Let us take you on a quick trip around the world via these five selected books of fiction with a sense of place that are currently on our shelves here at Stanfords:
by Chukwuebuka Ibeh
£14.99
Set in: Nigeria
When Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family’s apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.
Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, BLESSINGS is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.
They Fell Like Stars From The Sky & Other Stories
by Sheikha Helawy
£9.99
Set in: Palestine
They Fell Like Stars from the Sky and Other Stories is a collection of eighteen short stories celebrating the courage, resilience, tragedies and triumphs of Bedouin Palestinian women and girls.
From a woman whose tattoo arouses the alarm of sexual taboos to the young girls whose curiosities of womanhood spark endearment, and from the tragic outcome of a husband consumed by jealousy of his wife’s teenage love to the ecstatic love of an elderly woman for the game of football, these stories offer mesmerising portraits of life on the margins.
Featuring beautiful illustrations throughout, They Fell Like Stars from the Sky and Other Stories is a powerful ode to the Bedouin women and girls of Palestine and their spirit for every form of freedom.
by André Dao
£16.99
Set in: Vietnam
Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, this is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.
Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystallize the strands of thought that have shaped his life.
Andre Dao’s Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?
Last House Before the Mountain
by Monika Helfer, translated by Gillian Davidson
£14.99
Set in: Austria
Maria and Josef live with their children in a valley in westernmost Austria. When the First World War breaks out and Josef is drafted into the army, Maria is left to provide for her family alone. Every day is a struggle against starvation, the harsh alpine climate and the hostile nearby villagers who see Maria as little more than a beautiful temptress out for the men left behind. But when a red-haired stranger arrives in the village, Maria feels happiness seep back into her life and she faces a choice whose consequences will affect the lives of her family for generations to come.
Based on the internationally bestselling and award-winning Austrian novelist Monika Helfer’s own family history, Last House Before the Mountain is a propulsive, haunting, multi-layered saga about love, family, and the hidden wages of war.
by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott
£11.99
Set in: Argentina
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada’s unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.
Want to read more fiction with a sense of place?