Notes on Books

State violence continues through the people forced to carry its effects in Human Acts. Fox separates the case an investigation can close from the vocabulary grooming leaves inside a student. www.notesonbooks.net/business-con... #LiteraryFiction

Thomas reads a colleague's fear and withdrawal as evidence of mutual desire. Sandor Karacsony's The Watching Monad alternates their narration, and Thomas perceives the signs correctly. The distortion begins after perception. www.notesonbooks.net/the-watching... #LiteraryFiction

A degree was a sentence and graduation was release. B. stood for Burrel. Her parents decode the university gossip of her childhood, and literature turns out to mean agitation and propaganda. www.notesonbooks.net/free-coming-... #Memoir #BookReview

Lea Ypi's Free runs on a sequence of governing words. Prison was talked of as university, and after 1990 a new lexicon replaced the old, and her father came to use it on the Roma men at his gate. www.notesonbooks.net/free-coming-... #Memoir

In Ben Eastham's The Floating World, a widowed critic reads signs in a removals truck and a figure in a sheet. The signs he misses are plainer. A man who over-reads paintings and under-reads protests is useful to everyone. www.notesonbooks.net/the-floating... #BookSky

The narrator's own account survives as a private file hidden in a toilet tank. The altered book has already earned a royalty cheque. Lakghomi keeps interpretation behind physical fact, and the austerity is the price of the argument. www.notesonbooks.net/south/ #BookReview

The interrogator supplies the wording and the narrator supplies the handwriting: "I am a coward and conspirator like my father." Its first-person grammar makes state judgement resemble self-knowledge. www.notesonbooks.net/south/ #LiteraryFiction #BookReview

In Babak Lakghomi's South, political injury comes back as private failure. A father's book reaches print once his union history is cut, and a bad marriage now explains his disappearance. Only the explanation changes hands. www.notesonbooks.net/south/ #LiteraryFiction

Brando wants Luismi and will not say it aloud, least of all to himself. Among his friends, paying a man for sex is ordinary and wanting it is ruin. He acts on it once, and shame turns into homicidal intent. www.notesonbooks.net/hurricane-se... #QueerFiction #Masculinity

A retired British archaeologist, in Berlin since 1991, passes a drought summer at Teufelssee, a Grunewald lake cruised for generations. Three dead lovers appear to him there. What he saw organises all that follows. www.notesonbooks.net/the-living-r... #QueerFiction #LiteraryFiction

Five boys find the Witch's body in an irrigation canal outside La Matosa, "the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags." A dead woman and roadside litter sit in the same series. www.notesonbooks.net/hurricane-se... #LiteraryFiction

Fernanda Melchor builds a full interior for Brando, one of the killers, and none for the Witch. In Hurricane Season the village narrates her from outside, as gossip, and the form does to her what the village did. www.notesonbooks.net/hurricane-se... #LiteraryFiction #QueerFiction

Bloodied at the top of the stairs with a knife, Marián is defending herself in her own house. Polo sees the Bloody Countess, who hunted boys. His servitude is real, and Melchor shows it is available to him as an alibi. www.notesonbooks.net/paradais/ #Masculinity

Señora Marián slips an envelope of money into Polo's overalls. He smiles. Later he vomits at the memory of having smiled, and within a few pages he has made the envelope proof that she bought the right to humiliate him. www.notesonbooks.net/paradais/ #Masculinity #TranslatedFiction

Rape is the subject of Paradais long before anyone is raped. Fernanda Melchor sits a gardener and a resident's grandson on a dock with a bottle, and the talk turns into a plan. Somebody stayed to hear it. www.notesonbooks.net/paradais/ #LiteraryFiction #Masculinity

Fabricated evidence sends Andrés to prison for seven years. His wife's confession could free him, but she pays his lawyers, and freeing him would jail her. So the lawyers abandon the case. www.notesonbooks.net/this-is-not-... #BookReview

Dominican stowaways climb out of the winter sea at the port and beg the dockers, "Please, tell us we're in Miami." The men already have their answer. They need somebody to confirm it. www.notesonbooks.net/this-is-not-... #BookReview

Fernanda Melchor's This Is Not Miami begins in the gap between witnessing an event and knowing what has happened. In her Veracruz, a corrido can settle a killing, and an official version can do the violence itself. www.notesonbooks.net/this-is-not-... #BookReview

Humanoid crew want testing stopped and representatives present when update timelines are decided. That is collective bargaining. Ravn's organisation admits the dispute and records every consequence as a performance problem. www.notesonbooks.net/the-employees/ #LiteraryFiction

One employee, pained at starting to feel disloyal, asks for a role with less responsibility. The new post means losing speech. They consent, and the statement's final word breaks off mid-sentence. www.notesonbooks.net/the-employees/ #TranslatedFiction

The recognisable reading of Olga Ravn's The Employees is corporate satire. It does not survive the vocabulary. Reduced work capacity reads as absurd in fiction and accurate in a file at work. The disturbance is a function of proximity. www.notesonbooks.net/the-employees/ #LiteraryFiction

Christenze's head rolls out of the fire and speaks, an image sufficient to wreck the worldview that sentenced her. Then it states the book's argument outright. Near its end, Ravn has the narrator finish the interpretation. www.notesonbooks.net/the-wax-child/ #LiteraryFiction #QueerFiction

Apelone's speech has broken into a herring swimming in her head. Her confession arrives in fair copy, with a black book and a burned bullock heart. No leg screw appears in it. The paper keeps its composure after the woman has lost hers. www.notesonbooks.net/the-wax-child/ #TranslatedFiction

Four Aalborg women really did name a beeswax doll after Elisabeth and spit into its face. Olga Ravn grants the prosecution its magic in The Wax Child, then takes the harder route to proving a trial an atrocity. www.notesonbooks.net/the-wax-child/ #LiteraryFiction #TranslatedFiction

Marián asks Polo by name to help her. He kneels and tapes her ankles. Sophie Hughes's English runs the night of Paradais as one sentence, with no gap to weigh the request against the act. www.notesonbooks.net/biological-m... #TranslatedFiction

Aboard the Six Thousand Ship, Ravn's crew answer questions about how objects make them feel. The board files them as biological material. The ship and the animal hides are preserved. www.notesonbooks.net/biological-m... #BookReview

Olga Ravn and Fernanda Melchor share a subject, a life made readable to a system on terms the person does not set. Ravn needs a form and a clerk. In Melchor, the wall decides first. www.notesonbooks.net/biological-m... #BookReview

No release valve opens in John of John. Staying carries cost, and leaving does not annul it. Stuart, on the Booker shortlist, shows how truth, once delayed, arrives altered and diminished. www.notesonbooks.net/john-of-john... #Masculinity

A father's authority rests on religious certainty, and his life is organised around a truth he cannot acknowledge. His son comes home carrying another version of the same knowledge, shaped by departure rather than concealment. www.notesonbooks.net/john-of-john... #QueerFiction

Douglas Stuart's John of John sets its men on the Isle of Harris, where devotion and labour harden into moral enclosure. Desire is deferred and redirected until it governs how men speak and harm one another. www.notesonbooks.net/john-of-john... #QueerFiction

Jordan learns the island's own weapon, forced visibility, too well, and answers erasure with his own. James's Booker-shortlisted novel then lingers too long inside the performance of punishment. www.notesonbooks.net/the-disappea... #QueerFiction

A 1988 Kingston rehearsal of Fortune and Men's Eyes ends with men breaking through the door. Years on, Matt reaches Eddy's office under another name. “I'm Smitty. You must be Mona.” www.notesonbooks.net/the-disappea... #QueerFiction #LiteraryFiction

Jamaica does not need one method for losing gay men, and Marlon James's The Disappearers traces several, through aliases and silence as much as revenge. The novel is large and furious, and its size strains its control. www.notesonbooks.net/the-disappea... #QueerFiction #LiteraryFiction

On a train, Professor Justine Pearce meets the narrator's uncovered face and reads him as a troubling stranger. He presses himself to the window and calls, “I'm in here. It's me.” She recognises the bag more readily than the person inside it. www.notesonbooks.net/black-bag/ #LiteraryFiction

Black Bag, by Luke Kennard, has a tight comic premise. A broke actor paid to sit silently in a leather bag is noticed at last, though recognition reaches the role and misses the man. The novel carries it too far. www.notesonbooks.net/black-bag/ #LiteraryFiction

Strout's Booker-shortlisted novel is best with details it leaves alone, like Artie's sister Maria with white sugar around her mouth after eating in secret in the cellar. Maria needed no gloss. www.notesonbooks.net/the-things-w... #LiteraryFiction

We are pleased to announce our Spring/Summer 2027 Catalogue: fitzcarraldoeditions.com/catalogues/

We are delighted that DOONEEN by Keith Ridgway and WHAT AM I, A DEER? by Polly Barton are both shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize: www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-p...

THE FLOATING WORLD by Ben Eastham publishes today 🏝️ Head to the link below to read an extract and order a copy. fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-fl...

A plumber sits on the edge of Artie Dam's bathtub and tells him his wife is having an affair. Artie had seen nothing. Later he learns his son was conceived with another man, and the scene reads differently. www.notesonbooks.net/the-things-w... #LiteraryFiction

Elizabeth Strout builds The Things We Never Say on delay: a late disclosure lands and an ordinary scene rearranges itself. The method depends on scarcity, and too much of the novel forgets that. www.notesonbooks.net/the-things-w... #LiteraryFiction

Harrison, on the Booker shortlist, writes violence and landscape in one register. When Marnie fires into her neighbours, a trampled violin displaces the aftermath before the violence has registered, and that speed has a cost. www.notesonbooks.net/the-end-of-e... #LiteraryFiction

Beneath a pier, Marnie burns her nephew Phillip's body with Hampson's notebook. By morning she cannot tell bone from driftwood as she scrapes the remains into a biscuit tin. The notebook comes back charred but intact. www.notesonbooks.net/the-end-of-e... #LiteraryFiction

In The End of Everything, M. John Harrison alters Britain with the iGhetti and never explains them. Emails and notebooks gather round, and the limit is set from the start: something can reach you and stay unreadable. www.notesonbooks.net/the-end-of-e... #LiteraryFiction

Perry's Booker-shortlisted novel slips when the curator lectures on resin apples and states the thesis aloud. A later scene, over a needle hanging from the Queen's unfinished embroidery, leaves the argument unsaid. www.notesonbooks.net/may-we-feed-... #LiteraryFiction

★ Rebecca Perry, a poet and author of the essay collection 'On Trampolining,' delivers a striking and singular first novel about an unnamed curator gripped by visions of their medieval subject. It’s masterful. @transitbooks buff.ly/SrLd6sC

A King handles an egg for the first time and drops it. It rolls away intact. The cook asks whether he has the hands of God, and once the staff pass it on, a miracle is in circulation. Perry makes the charm of that the trap. www.notesonbooks.net/may-we-feed-... #LiteraryFiction

Certainty is the subject of Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King: how fast a thing seen once acquires the authority of record. A curator rebuilds a reign from kitchen ledgers, and the court that kept them gets caught at it. www.notesonbooks.net/may-we-feed-... #LiteraryFiction

#TheEndOfEverything by M. John Harrison is on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist! We are absolutely delighted to see this magnificent novel on the shortlist. A huge congratulations to our wonderful author M. John Harrison 🐚 Discover more about the shortlist here: thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...