Os 13 nomeados deste ano para o The International Booker Prize

 The International Booker Prize 2025 - Longlisted

The Book of Disappearance

Written by Ibtisam Azem

Translated by Sinan Antoon

Original language: Arabic

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Ibtisam Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. 

That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out. 

Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance – which was critically acclaimed in its original Arabic edition – is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory. 

 

 

On the Calculation of Volume I

Written by Solvej Balle

Translated by Barbara J. Haveland

Original language: Danish

In the first part of Solvej Balle’s epic septology, Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November

She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.  

But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. 

As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape. 

On the Calculation of Volume I is the first book of a planned septology. Five books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 20 countries

 

 

 

There's a Monster Behind the Door

Written by Gaëlle Bélem

Translated by Karen FleetwoodLaëtitia Saint-Loubert

Original language: French

In 1980s’ Réunion, monsters lurk beneath the surface of vibrant island life, ready to pounce at the slightest disturbance

La Réunion in the 1980s: a place of high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. Here, a little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents’ reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. 

The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own. 

Rich in the history of the island’s customs and superstition and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirise the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.

 

 

 

Solenoid

Written by Mircea Cărtărescu

Translated by Sean Cotter

Original language: Romanian

Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life, and then spirals into a bizarre, existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics

Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, the novel grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. 

In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction and history with autobiography – the book is partly based on Cărtărescu’s experiences as a teacher – Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present. 

 

 

 

 

 

Reservoir Bitches

Written by Dahlia de la Cerda

Translated by Julia SanchesHeather Cleary

Original language: Spanish

Life’s a bitch. That’s why you’ve got to rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth. A linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, 13 Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, cheat, cry and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices.  

At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers. 

 

 

 

Small Boat

Written by Vincent Delecroix

Translated by Helen Stevenson

Original language: French

November 2021: an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen?
Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.  

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?  

A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes. 

 

 

 

Hunchback

Written by Saou Ichikawa

Translated by Polly Barton

Original language: Japanese

A literary phenomenon in Japan, Hunchback is an extraordinary and thrilling debut novel about sex, disability and power.
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal… 

Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Written by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Asa Yoneda

Original language: Japanese

An inventive and immersive speculative novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction – from the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world. 

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human. 

 

 

 

Eurotrash

Written by Christian Kracht

Translated by Daniel Bowles

Original language: German

A jaded writer takes his spiky mother and her ill-gotten wealth on a road trip in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his 80-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past. 

Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair’s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers. 

 

Publicado em Português pela ELSINORE em 02-2025 com o título “Perfeições”

Perfection

Written by Vincenzo Latronico

Translated by Sophie Hughes

Original language: Italian

A taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s 24-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. 

But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. 

 

 

Heart Lamp

Written by Banu Mushtaq

Translated by Deepa Bhasthi

Original language: Kannada

In 12 stories, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India

Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.  

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come. 

 

 

On a Woman's Madness

Written by Astrid Roemer

Translated by Lucy Scott

Original language: Dutch

This classic of queer literature – as electrifying today as it was when it first appeared in 1982 – tells the story of a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her choosing 

When Noenka’s abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, she flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations. 

Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. ‘I’m Noenka,’ she responds resolutely, ‘which means Never Again.’ 

 

 

A Leopard-Skin Hat

Written by Anne Serre

Translated by Mark Hutchinson

Original language: French

The story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders

Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance’, A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet.  

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.

Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s signature style. 

 

Queima de livros - século XXI ? in O Público edição de 02-03-25

 

Vão ser queimados livros de novo?

• Público - Edição Lisboa
• 2 Mar 2025
• Pedro Adão e Silva

Há uma longa história de censura de livros que recrudesce ciclicamente. Nos EUA, no meio de várias outras ignomínias, regressou em força. Nesta semana, o The Guardian noticiou que, na sequência da ordem executiva de Trump relativa à igualdade de género, se iniciou, nas escolas para filhos de militares geridas pelo Pentágono (são 160, com 70 mil alunos), um processo de verificação dos conteúdos de livros, cujo acesso ficou, entretanto, suspenso.

Esta purga literária tem um propósito: restringir o acesso a livros que deem voz à diferença. Entre os títulos banidos, encontra-se uma autobiografia ilustrada dedicada a um público infantil da atriz Julianne Moore, que celebra uma ruiva que cresceu com sardas, tornando-as parte de uma identidade positiva; um outro volume, também infantil, sobre a vida de Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a segunda magistrada a fazer parte do Supremo e uma defensora da igualdade; e vários livros de história, designadamente sobre as lutas pela emancipação dos afroamericanos. Sintomaticamente, os eventos dedicados ao Black History Month, que decorre neste mês, foram também suspensos. Como sempre acontece nestes exercícios de cancelamento, o ridículo está sempre à espreita e a autobiografia de J. D. Vance também foi parar à lista – afinal, trata um tema identitário, os habitantes dos Apalaches.

Infelizmente, não se vislumbra nenhuma comicidade em mais este episódio da América em ruínas. Já no final do ano, o PEN-America avisava que “os livros estão sob ameaça na América” e reportava mais de dez mil casos de censura só no ano letivo 2023-24, em 29 estados – num ranking em que se destacava a Florida, seguida do Iowa.

Paradoxalmente, enquanto uma coligação grotesca se alcandorou ao poder arvorando-se grande defensora da liberdade de expressão, todos os dias assistimos a episódios de restrição das liberdades, aproximando a realidade da ficção distópica.

Sê tu mesmo(a)

 Sabes, muitas vezes, na ânsia de seres amado ou aceite, moldaste ao que imaginas ser o ideal para o outro, perdendo a tua essência. Forçares o encaixe num coração que não tem espaço para a tua autenticidade, só gera desgaste e sentimentos distorcidos. É importante lembrar que o amor verdadeiro floresce quando cada um se mantém fiel a si mesmo. Aceitar que nem todos os corações tem o mesmo compasso, é aceitar a diferença de cada um. Em vez de te encaixares em algum coração, permite-te viver a tua singularidade e encontra pessoas que possam agir de forma natural, porque são essas relações que te tornam único e, forçar uma adaptação pode comprometer a beleza do teu ser. Valoriza o amor que tens por ti e aprende a reconhecer que o espaço certo para ti é qualquer um, é onde a tua essência é celebrada. Permite-te encontrar pessoas que sintam o mesmo ritmo do teu coração, sem precisarem de ajustes forçados. Sê livre para seres exatamente quem tu és…!!!

Ricardo Esteves

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A banalização / adulteração da Democracia

 Democracia: Entre o Ideal e a Farsa

A democracia, concebida como um dos pilares fundamentais da civilização ocidental, é frequentemente enaltecida como a mais nobre das formas de governo. Seu princípio basilar reside na soberania popular, na liberdade de expressão e na alternância de poder, garantindo que a vontade coletiva prevaleça sobre os desmandos individuais. Contudo, quando invocada por bocas ineptas e canalhas, a democracia torna-se um simulacro, um manto de legitimidade para práticas que, em essência, subvertem seus próprios ideais.

A banalização da democracia ocorre quando ela é reduzida a um mero slogan, usado por aqueles que a vociferam em público, mas a esvaziam na prática. O que deveria ser um instrumento de emancipação social e garantia de direitos transforma-se, assim, em um véu que encobre a perversidade da manipulação, da corrupção e da tirania travestida de legalidade. Como alertava Platão em A República, uma democracia degenerada pode ser o prelúdio da demagogia, onde líderes populistas exploram a ignorância e as paixões da multidão para consolidar seus próprios interesses. Nessa distorção, a democracia não é mais o governo do povo, mas o teatro do engano.

Nietzsche, ao diagnosticar as doenças do espírito moderno, alertava para a falácia da moralidade dos fracos, onde palavras como “justiça” e “igualdade” podem ser usadas não como valores autênticos, mas como instrumentos de ressentimento e manipulação. O mesmo ocorre com a democracia quando empregada de maneira hipócrita: em vez de servir à coletividade, torna-se um escudo retórico para ocultar intenções egoístas, perpetuar oligarquias e subjugar o indivíduo à vontade de facções que, ironicamente, falam em nome do “bem comum”.

A grande tragédia dessa perversão da democracia não é apenas a ascensão de figuras que instrumentalizam o discurso democrático para fins escusos, mas a erosão da própria fé nas instituições. Quando a democracia é repetidamente usada como máscara para a injustiça, o povo começa a descrer de sua validade. Isso abre espaço para extremos: o cinismo político, a apatia social ou mesmo a tentação autoritária, onde a ordem parece mais sedutora do que a falsa liberdade.

Mas a solução não reside no abandono da democracia, e sim em sua restauração como valor genuíno. A democracia verdadeira não pode ser apenas uma estrutura formal, mas um compromisso ético e racional com a dignidade humana. Ela exige cidadãos críticos, capazes de reconhecer quando sua essência está sendo deturpada, e líderes que a vejam não como um meio para seus próprios fins, mas como um fim em si mesma.

Portanto, sempre que a palavra democracia for pronunciada, é preciso perguntar: ela está sendo evocada com sinceridade ou apenas como um artifício de poder? Se a resposta for a segunda, então talvez estejamos diante não de um regime de liberdade, mas de sua mais elaborada ilusão.

Oliver Harden

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