December global fiction: The horrors of private life come alive in these six new titles

All information sourced from publishers.

Cape Fever, Nadia Davis

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter, where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.

While Mrs Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé, Nour, by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs Hattingh writes – a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

The Wax Child, Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.

It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour; it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…

Swallowed, Meg Smitherman

Humanity’s first mission to the Planet ended in tragedy, but botanist Jill Jones won’t let that stop her from joining the second one.

Perfect climate, perfect terrain, perfect flora and fauna; the Planet has called to Jill all her life. She knows, with bone-deep certainty, it's home. A new beginning for humanity. She just needs a chance to prove it.

But as Jill and her team survey the Planet, a mysterious presence begins to infiltrate their thoughts.

When her colleagues start to disappear, it's up to Jill to uproot the Planet's secrets before they consume her, her friends …

And the one man she would do anything to keep.

No Place to Bury the Dead, Karina Sainz Borgo, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer

In an unnamed Latin American country, a mysterious plague quickly spreads, erasing the memory of anyone infected. Angustias Romero flees with her family, but their flight is tragically cut short when she loses both her children. Consumed by grief, she finds herself within the hallucinatory expanse of Mezquite – a town corrupted by greed and populated by storytellers, refugees, and violent, predatory gangs.

Here, Angustias is finally able to lay her children to rest at the Third Country, a cemetery run by the larger-than-life Visitación Salazar and a refuge beyond suffering and fear. While Visitación remains defiant in her mission to care for the dead, the cemetery she oversees is the focal point of a bitter land dispute with Alcides Abundio, the most feared landowner of the border. Caught in this power struggle, Angustias and Visitación – friends and sometimes rivals – stand their ground on a frontier where the law is dictated by violence; a surreal territory whose very nature blurs the boundaries between life and death.

Devotions: Eight Stories, Lucy Caldwell

In her new collection, Lucy Caldwell explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures.

A woman recalls the time her grandfather claimed to have met Jesus.

A professional musician travels across the world and through her memories with a violin older than the US.

A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York.

The Burning Origin, Daniele Mencarelli, translated from the Italian by Octavian MacEwen

Gabriele left Rome to reinvent himself. He traded the working-class streets of his childhood for the sleek design studios of Milan, where he’s built a successful career and a new life – one carefully distanced from the neighbourhood he came from.

But when he returns home for a family celebration, Gabriele is pulled back into a world that feels both comforting and claustrophobic: the slow rhythms of Rome, his loving but provincial family, and childhood friends whose lives have remained circumscribed by the same few blocks. Torn between nostalgia and shame, Gabriele is forced to reckon with everything he tried to leave behind.

And when a rumour about the true source of his success begins to circulate, the careful identity he’s constructed in Milan begins to crumble. In the space between who he was and who he’s become, Gabriele must confront the question of where he truly belongs.