JAN/FEB: Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is a quiet middle-aged lawyer, living a modest existence in Bordeaux. She has been so effectively consumed by her job she is known to all simply as Maître Susane. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can’t quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial? 

MAR/APR: The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison

Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

MAY: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin

Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.

AUG/SEP: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

OCT/NOV: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.