Bad Kids

"I tend to read quite a bit of crime fiction translated from other languages and 2023 was no exception. Bad Kids was first published in China in 2014—where it has (apparently) been turned into a wildly popular online TV show—but only came out in English last year. It opens with a man pushing his parents-in-law to their deaths off the side of a mountain. The book has quite a lot of fun horrifying the reader by completely upending Confucian norms—which emphasize respecting your elders and your parents in particular—and exploring what it takes to derail the perfect student. It’s set in Ningbo, the city near Shanghai where the author lives. One book I enjoyed for its setting was Reykjavík , written in Icelandic by Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir and translated into English by Victoria Cribb. It’s a bit of a trip down memory lane as it’s set in 1986 and revolves around a murder committed in the 1950s. We see the development of Iceland and the Reykjavík Summit, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met. It’s also the only book on this list written by a national leader: Jakobsdóttir has been prime minister of Iceland since 2017."