DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
Down with the Poor!
By Shumona Sinha
LesFugitives Press, £12.99
Eastbound
By Maylis de Kerangal
LesFugitives Press, £10.99
SHUMONA Sinha’s Down with the Poor! translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, sets up a complex and perplexing position on south Asian immigration to France.
The first-person narrative belongs to a young Indian woman, a translator at asylum appeal hearings in Paris. She is spending the night in police cells having smashed a bottle over a man’s head — an asylum-seeker.
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
The book feels like a writer working within his limits and not breaking any new ground, believes KEN COCKBURN


