A Shining

"Of course. Look out for the new book from Jon Fosse , A Shining , which will be released 31 October in the US and 1 November in the UK. It’s a surreal, dreamlike sequence set in the Norwegian woods, in which the narrator’s car becomes stuck in a rut on a remote track. Like his remarkable Septology , which floored me last year , the English translation is by the US writer Damian Searls—who learned Norwegian specifically to translate Fosse. (If you’re interested in the art of translation , there’s some interesting discussion of Searls’s rendering of Fosse’s texts in this 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books .) Another Norwegian literary sensation, Karl Ove Knausgård, will publish The Wolves of Eternity , a sequel to Morning Star . It’s an expansive work of speculative fiction with a metaphysical element; “like some 19th-century Russian novel,” notes Sven Birkerts in The New York Times , The Wolves of Eternity “wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?” There’s an extract available over on Lithub, if you want a taster. Translation by Martin Aitken. David Diop, author of the extraordinary (and extraordinarily brutal) 2021 International Booker Prize winner At Night All Blood is Black , returns with a new novel: Beyond the Door of No Return, translated from the French by Sam Taylor. It’s a nested, metafictional tale: in Paris, 1806, woman pieces together the notebooks of her late father, revealing his experiences in 17th-century Senegal and a strange tale of obsession, love, and adventure. Lithub has an extract of this too."