The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in Toronto. It is narrated from the present day, referring to previous events that span the twentieth century but mostly the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop, for example, the On-to-Ottawa Trek and a 1934 Communist rally at Maple Leaf Gardens. Greater verisimilitude is given by a series of newspaper articles commenting on events and on the novel's characters from a distance.
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, India, who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. After a shipwreck, he survives 227 days while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger peculiarly named Richard Parker and an orangutan named Orange Juice along with several other zoo animals, raising questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 mystery novel by British writer Mark Haddon. Its title refers to an observation by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in the 1892 short story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze". Haddon and The Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Unusually, it was published simultaneously in separate editions for adults and children.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day in it Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Karl Ove Knausgård is a Norwegian author. He became known worldwide for a series of six autobiographical novels titled My Struggle. The Wall Street Journal has described him as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations".
Rachel Cusk FRSL is a British novelist and writer.
Hisham Matar is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist, and memoirist. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and his memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and several other awards. Matar's essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, and many other publications. He has also written several other novels.
Christian Kracht is a Swiss author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
The Swiss Book Prize is a literary award awarded annually by a jury on behalf of the Swiss Booksellers' Association. The prize amount is CHF 30,000. The award was instituted in 2008 following the example of the German Book Prize. Only German language works of authors living in Switzerland or of Swiss nationality are eligible.
Transit is a novel by German writer Anna Seghers, set in Vichy Marseilles after France fell to Nazi Germany. Written in German, it was published in English in 1944, and has also been translated into other languages.
David James Woodard is an American conductor and writer.
Benedict Wells is a German-Swiss novelist.
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.
The Dead is a 2016 gothic novel by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht, his fifth novel. It is set in the film industry at the end of the Weimar era and tells the story of a (fictional) Swiss director, Emil Nägeli, and a Japanese government official who try to create a collaboration between German and Japanese cinema. The plot centers around the May 15 Incident.
No One Is Talking About This is the debut novel by American poet Patricia Lockwood, published in 2021. It was simultaneously released in the United States and United Kingdom via Riverhead and Bloomsbury, respectively. The novel focuses on an unnamed woman who is extremely active on social media. Her life changes focus after the birth of her niece.
The Old Drift is a 2019 historical fiction and science fiction novel by Zambian author Namwali Serpell. Set in Rhodesia/Zambia, it is Serpell's debut novel and follows the lives of three interwoven families in three generations. It won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Der gelbe Bleistift. Reisegeschichten aus Asien is a 2000 book by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht. It is a collection of travel writing originally published in Welt am Sonntag.
