The jaunty title of Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? (Fig Tree, £14.99) belies an insidious sadness. It won the German Book Prize in 2024, and is the first novel by Martina Hefter to be published in English, translated by Linda L Gaus Juno, the narrator, is a dancer and performance artist in her fifties, as well as a full-time carer for her husband who suffers from a degenerative disease.
In their apartment in Leipzig she stays up all night chatting to romance scammers she tracks down via Instagram, double-bluffing them, leading their conversations into bewildering culs-de-sac. The novel follows the course of her friendship with a man who reveals his true identity as Benu from Nigeria, at which Juno becomes obsessed by the minutiae of his life, and the conditions of the society he has been born into.
From the first page Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? is funny, offbeat and desperately moving. Hefter writes with voluminous poignancy about dying and caring, the challenges of middle age, the struggles of being a mid-career artist. And yet in spite of the difficulties Juno faces daily, she never loses awareness of the privilege that living in a western democracy has afforded her.
The uneven distribution of wealth is a topic that perennially occupies Mieko Kawakami. Sisters in Yellow (Picador, £16.99), translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, is told from the point of view of Hana, a teenager who becomes drawn into the underbelly of Tokyo in the 1990s; a world of cabaret clubs, illegal gambling and credit card skimming. Hana has endured a childhood of chronic poverty and uncertainty. She abandons school early so she can start to work and take control of her future. She leaves home with honourable intentions, but a series of misfortunes lead her inevitably into crime.
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Kawakami is celebrated for her frank explorations of class, female relationships, and the alien experience of the body. She also excels when it comes to banality, in her descriptions of the endless rounds of cup ramen Hana eats with her friends, and the empty hours they spend gathered around the “kotatsu”, a bizarre piece of furniture that is somehow simultaneously a table and a futon. While Sisters in Yellow powerfully portrays Hana’s scrabble for survival, it is a compelling novel as much for its idle interludes as for a propulsive plot line.
The Abyss (Transit Books, £23.99) by Jeyamohan, translated from Tamil by Suchitra Ramachandran, is a uniquely harrowing novel. Also set in the 1990s, it follows the exploits of Pothivelu Pandaram, an ageing family man who earns a comfortable living from the trade of physically deformed beggars: people suffering from leprosy, genetic birth defects and elephantiasis. Pandaram prays multiple times a day at the temple, and dotes on his youngest daughter, all the while treating his beggars with a total absence of compassion.
It’s hard to imagine how a novel that contains frequent scenes of monstrous violence – beatings, rape, the mutilation of children – might also be illuminating, but amid the atrocity, there are moments of levity. There’s the playful banter exchanged between beggars, evocatively rendered into English, and then at the core of the story there is an enchanting, unforgettable character – Mangandi Samy – who has only one arm, no legs, and “a face that always seemed to smile, with tiny, twinkling eyes”. He sings bittersweet, beautiful love songs that he makes up himself.
Jeyamohan’s cast of characters was inspired by the author’s own experiences of living on the streets as a young man. In the decades since he has become a heavyweight of Tamil literature, occasionally courting controversy for his outspoken views, and yet there is nothing injudicious about The Abyss. The author has skilfully disappeared inside this extraordinary and important story about the inhumanity of powerful men.
Such inhumanity is a pervasive presence in Event Horizon (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99), the first novel by Balsam Karam, but her second – following The Singularity – to be translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel. It is focused on a community of mothers and daughters who, for reasons that are never entirely clear, have been deemed undesirable and driven into exile, to a cat-infested ghetto beyond the limits of a coastal city. This is where Milde grows up. In the novel we meet her as a young woman, the ringleader of a quashed uprising against the ruling class, which is white and predominantly male. After a period of hiding, then a period of imprisonment and torture, Milde is forced to choose between being publicly executed or launched into space on an expedition that will result in certain death.
Event Horizon seems, most of the time, to be the depiction of a futuristic dystopia, but there are moments when it feels eerily as though these circumstances could be playing out right now, somewhere in the world. Karam’s use of repetition creates a looping motion throughout the short novel, perpetuating the illusion that the setting is nowhere and everywhere, both current and eternal.
If there is to be any redemption for powerful men, it is bestowed by Héctor Abad in Aside from My Heart, All is Well (Archipelago Books, $25). Translated from Spanish by Anne McClean, it tells the touching story of Luis Cordóba, a pioneering Colombian clergyman who has been prescribed a rest cure as he awaits a heart transplant. Here is a priest who is decidedly woke: embracing aesthetics, championing underdogs, challenging authority. As he rests, Luis studies the biology, mythology and poetry of the heart. It’s a novel of unlikely juxtapositions: theology and sexual fantasy, opera and scripture, piety and abuse. Abad seems to be encouraging us to see inside the souls of these imperfect priests, to accept them as the problematic men they are beneath their cassocks, all against the backdrop of bustling, sun-baked Medellín, and a flamboyant cast of parrots, fish, kids, convalescents and novice seminarians.
The heart is again a locus of Happiness (Prototype, £12.99) by Yuri Felsen, the sequel to Deceit, which was first published in English in 2022. Felsen is the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein, an irreligious Jew who fled Russia after the revolution and settled in Paris in 1923. While Deceit took the form of a diary, Happiness is written as a monologue addressed to the narrator’s tempestuous muse, Lyolya. Among a select group of fellow exiles, the couple spend their days floating around the city, drinking vodka in dim sittingrooms, playing cards and discussing literature. The narrator is chiefly concerned with creative freedom. He earns scarcely as much money as he needs from sketchy business deals, knowing it will never be enough to support a wife, despite his ferocious devotion to Lyolya. He occasionally expresses a keen awareness of “the little good time that we have left”, which is especially moving in light of the fact that the author was killed in Auschwitz when he was only in his forties.
Happiness is saved from being a brooding novel by Bryan Karetnyk’s lively translation. Idiosyncratic words like “liquorish” and “fremdness” never seem misplaced but rather enhance the particularity of the author’s style. I finished reading with the feeling that while Freudenstein may have died in 1943, Felsen lives on through his spirited, absorbing, enduringly relevant writing.
Sara Baume’s latest book, Opening Night, is to be published on July 2nd by Granta.
