Best Books of 2022 x 2

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal (published Sept. 2022) was listed in the Financial Times’ best books of the year (fiction in translation):

“Though first published in France 10 years ago, there is a contemporary resonance to this slender tale of a young Russian conscript, Aliocha, trying to escape the army on the Trans-Siberian railway and encountering Hélène, a fellow fugitives in flight from her own past.”

Both DOWN WITH THE POOR! by Shumona Sinha (published Aug. 2022) and EASTBOUND featured among Preti Taneja’s three best books of 2022 in The New Statesman:

I loved two books from small press Les Fugitives. Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound (translated by Jessica Moore) propels us through a fevered journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Shumona Sinha’s brutal Down with the Poor! (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) breaks open a colonised brown mind negotiating its place between the black and Asian refugees and white do-gooders of contemporary France.’

Preti Taneja is the winner of the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize for second book Aftermath, and of the Desmond Elliott Prize, as well as the Eastern Eye Award for Literature for her debut novel We That Are Young.