Global fiction

The imaginative world of fiction is always spiced up notch when the author approaches the story with non-Western eyes: a different cadence, a different tone, a different experience upon which to draw.
A former Algerian army officer, writing as Yasmina Khadra, has just published a follow-up to his award-winning novel The Swallows of Kabul. This new novel – The Sirens of Baghdad – examines the events that drive a young University of Baghdad student to become a radical militant.
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami examines the weird lives people lead in the darkest hours of the night. After Dark consists of the interwoven stories of three main characters, and the conversations in the novel are mesmerizing.
The main protagonist of South African writer Andre Brink's latest is a novelist looking back over his sexual history, and thinking about the way it intersects with the history of South Africa. In Before I Forget, the sexual encounters are mostly hollow, ugly and unsatisfying, but then the history of South Africa doesn’t generally warm the cockles of the heart, either.