February global fiction: Six new novels from around the world investigate the human experience

All information sourced from publishers.

Kin, Tayari Jones

Vernice and Annie are “cradle friends”, born days apart in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers. The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood. But this is the American South in the 1950s. Black girls like Vernice and Annie have to fight for every opportunity they can, and neither one can build the future they hope for in Honeysuckle.

Gradually, inevitably, the girls drift apart. Vernice pursues her education; Annie is lured by the promise of a heady first love affair and a growing obsession with finding her mother. But her search pulls her even further into a world of danger that soon leaves her oldest friend battling to save her.

She Made Herself a Monster, Anna Kovatcheva

Yana, a vampire hunter, rides into Koprivci promising salvation. The village’s curse has endured for many years and rumour has it that Anka – whose parents died on the night of her birth – is to blame. But enduring the villagers’ suspicion is the least of Anka’s worries; now she has reached womanhood, she can no longer avoid the odious marriage that seems to be her only option.

When animal corpses start to appear in the village square and eggs filled with blood are found in the chicken coops, panic rises. The villagers look to Yana for hope. She knows all about the monsters that stalk the night, monsters that only she can vanquish. But Yana is a liar. And monsters come in all different forms.

Yana and Anka become unlikely allies in hatching a plot to save both Koprivci and Anka from their fates. But then their plan takes on a horrifying life of its own…

Good People, Patmeena Sabit

The Sharaf family is the picture of success. They arrived in America as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighbourhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.

But when Zorah dies in an unthinkable tragedy, the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but, and soon the veneer of the model immigrant family starts to crumble.

Those who knew her best – and those who never met her – all have an opinion on who Zorah really was, and what really happened to her…

Facing the Bridge, Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges…

These three tales by Yoko Tawada cross cultures and histories with a sensuous playfulness. In Facing the Bridge, obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift in a never-ending balance.

Greedy, Callie Kuzumi

Ed is in trouble with the yakuza. He’s gambled away all his money and his family is at risk.
But just as he’s about to lose everything, he receives an offer he can’t refuse.

A reclusive billionaire is looking for a private chef. The only catch: she has some … unusual tastes.

As he prepares delicious dishes – fresh crab salad with a panko crumb, lamb shank dripping in red wine juice, sweet, fluffy soufflé pancakes – he realises that each meal is a test, a challenge to satisfy an insatiable appetite.

Caught up in a world more sinister than he could ever have imagined, Ed finds himself entangled in another debt.

As the stakes grow, he must make a choice.

Will he stay hungry? Or will he be greedy?

The End and the Beginning, KJ Holdom

At the start of the war, eight-year-old Max Bernot lives with his sister and parents in Lauterbach, Saarland, a narrow strip of territory between the French and German defence lines. His German father, Anton, and his French mother, Marguerite, do their best to shield Max and his sister, Anna, from Nazi violence, but in late 1944, their beloved godfather is executed in their garden by the SS, and Max, now thirteen, is conscripted in the Volkssturm. Less than a month later, Max flees a Hitler Youth camp in Bavaria with his best friend, Hans. His mission: to return home and tell his mother the truth about his godfather’s murder As he escapes, he sends postcards to his family that trace his fraught journey across a country in its death throes.

Unbeknownst to Max, his mother is trapped in the German interior, coerced into working for a fanatical Nazi officer. Desperate to escape and reunite her family, Marguerite must first protect Anna from the sinister attentions of their captor, who could hold information on Max’s whereabouts even as Allied planes circle closer.

The End and the Beginning maps the loss of innocence of a generation of children raised in the shadow of the Reich and follows the fate of one family, neither wholly French nor entirely German, who find themselves on the wrong side whichever way they turn.