The French-Senagalese writer and academic David Diop has taken home the International Booker Prize for a novel translated into English from another language.
A young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time.
She tells of the times before the child was born, when the world felt unsure and enveloped in darkness, of long nights with an older lover, of her writing career and the precariousness of beginning a relationship and then a family with her husband, Bo.
A portrait of modern motherhood, THE CHILD is a love story about what it means to be alive and stay alive, no matter how hard the journey.
From the mysterious monoliths in
Arrival, one of science fictionâs favourite tropes is the alien artefact that defies human comprehension. Danish author Olga Ravnâs brilliantly unusual novel
The Employees, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker prize, is an SF epic in miniature, but it takes a prosaic approach to our dreams of extraterrestrial transcendence. âItâs not hard to clean them,â says a crew member of the strange objects found on the faraway planet New Discovery, now housed in the Six-Thousand Ship orbiting above. âI normally use a little brush.â
The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; itâs also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human. The book takes the form of a series of statements â some missing, some with material redacted â made by the crew to a bureaucratic commit