ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Letters From Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Mexican Brenda Navarro and Argentinean Claudia Pineiro and of poetry by Nicaraguan-Costa Rican Lester Gomez Medina
CAREFUL CRAFTSMAN: Nicaraguan-Costa Rican writer Lester Gomez Medina
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
EMPTY HOUSES (Daunt Books, £9.99), Mexican writer Brenda Navarro’s first novel, is the devastating story of a mother who loses her small child in a playground somewhere in Mexico and her relentless search to find him.
It is also the story of a working-class woman who has kidnapped the child in order to fulfil her maternal desires and, fittingly, the chapters begin with epigraphs from the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska that set the tone for what it is yet to come.
The narrative alternates between the harrowing stories of these two desperate woman as they try to make sense of motherhood, mental and physical abuse and trauma in a novel that questions maternal instincts in patriarchies and the place of women in modern society.
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DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
LEO BOIX reviews two powerful Latin American novels in which myth and crime fiction expose the deadly consequences of patriarchy, clandestine abortion and state violence
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin