Series: Verso Fiction

Judith is a successful novelist, but she's a little sensitive. She's from a good family, even if that family favours her more beautiful sister. She loves a drink (or three) but isn't sure if she loves the handsome doctor who is courting her. She yearns for a romance to yield to but remains a virgin. Judith receives visions from the...

With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that...

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice, and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death...

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city, she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises. At night, she hears the...

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting...

"To mother is to murder, or close enough," thinks Johanna as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. Recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence, she is preparing for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood, and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic...

To mother is to murder, or close enough, thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a...

"I want to read about women who can't make things." Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a university archive dedicated to women's art, because she "wants to read about women who can't make things." There she discovers one side of a correspondence...

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval follows Jo, who finds herself in a strange new country for university, experiencing a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, Jo discovers her odd home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Her sensitivity and senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the...

The young man arrived in Paris, a refugee from political repression, just as World War I was raging to a close. He came with just a few coins in his pocket, a painfully shy twentysomething who stammered when he spoke in public, though he had sailed the world as a lowly deckhand. He moved into a dingy hotel on a...

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to the Pacific Northwest. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man....

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interrupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked...

"To mother is to murder, or close enough," thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a...

Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. To what degree should the horrors of the past be allowed to shake the present? Stalked by the darkest of shadows from her childhood, a woman struggles against the tide dragging her back to the family she fled years ago. This emotionally searing novel is at once a wrenching look at a...

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom. Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy. A philandering husband receives...

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world’s journalists. In this rigorously researched factual novel—drawn almost entirely from historical documents—Olivier...

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera. Through their padded jackets, she feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk...

After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city's strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. She thinks she finds salvation when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on their...

'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.' "Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.' Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its...

A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day, and sentenced to death by guillotine....