Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
Ambivalence towards working life is the subject of this tremendously entertaining debut novel. “I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill,” says 32-year-old Marisa. She’s “head of creative strategy” in a Madrid ad agency. “That’s a big deal,” says a friend. “No,” Marisa replies, “it just sounds like one.” She kills time between projects by posting trolling comments on dismal YouTube videos. Eventually she faces the worst horror of all: a team-building retreat, which she ends up dealing with in a masterfully perverse way. There’s pain underlying her quips (“No one knows who I really am”), but her story is peppered with pithy insights into the modern workplace, and plenty of vivid characters, such as the friend who’s “had work done”. “I’m filled with plastic,” she tells Marisa. “I’m the Atlantic Ocean.”
Hunter by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Granta, £12.99)
Set largely in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shenyang, these diverse stories share a blend of urban grittiness and surreal strangeness. In one, a man accompanies his father in an ambulance to hospital, but finds everyone else – including the driver – is asleep. In another, a man goes from stalking women to shooting squirrels; elsewhere, we encounter a remake of The Tempest, and a man who claims to be the last survivor from another planet. Motifs recur – actors, parents, people needing urgently to pee – bringing a sense of unity, however warped. The frequent surprises in these stories, which are darkly charming and hard to shake off, suggest Xuetao may have followed the advice of one of his own characters on writing: “Just sit there, smack your head and let the words flow out.”
Blurred by Iris Wolff, translated by Ruth Martin (Moth, £9.99)
This novel, with the breadth of an epic and the lightness of touch of a fairytale, is a pocket history of 20th-century Romania. At its heart is a boy, Samuel, though the story moves not through him but around him: viewpoints include his mother, who is driven by her passions (“the mind took time; the heart was quick”); his grandmother; and a childhood friend. The style is equally comfortable with cultural history (when a child dies, windows are opened, chairs upturned: “death must not feel at home here again too soon”), an action-packed escape in a crop-dusting plane or ironic commentary on the Ceausescu regime. “He loved his people so much […] he shielded [them] from pride by preventing them from having their own opinions.” All in all, the lives in this compact marvel of a book are presented “so vividly you think you remember them yourself”.
Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer, translated by Eleanor Updegraff (Pushkin, £14.99)
“In the beginning was the artichoke.” And so opens a dinner party evening somewhere in contemporary Europe. The participants are types – “the hostess”, “the American woman”, “the Swiss man” – and they lubricate the hours with plenty of sparkling Crémant (“they were now on the third bottle”). There’s a sensibility akin to Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection in everyone’s obsession with names and cultural touchstones, as they share selfies on social media (#FoodPorn #BestFriendsForever). The tone of this moreish story swings between sadness and satire, whether the guests are parroting received opinions, celebrity-spotting (Hugh Grant “looks like an old woman these days”) or reflecting on “the shift from general lack to general surfeit during the course of the 20th century”. By the end of the evening, when things spiral outward and the police come calling, only one question remains. “Is there any more Crémant?”
