I created you in my headBy Marta Pérez-Carbonell, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey (Riverhead).. “All versions of a story coexist like colors in a Rubik’s cube,” says Alicia, the narrator of this first novel. “And it’s hard to get them all in line.” One night, on the sleeper train from London to Edinburgh, Alicia listens to a stranger give his version of a divisive incident in which a friend’s life is used as fodder for a best-selling novel. Alicia also decides to share a dark part of her own past for the first time. “Confessions, outbursts and revelations” abound as this strange narrative considers what it means to bear witness to another person and how doing so can permanently change us.
Days and ChancesBy Joanna Klink (Penguin). The carefully crafted poems in this collection explore the permeability of the boundary between inner life and external events and express how an individual can appear bound to space and time as a separate entity, yet at the same time be at one with the world. One poem begins: “Some days I’m so full of myself / I can’t see anything,” but another reflects: “Some days I’m nothing but hearsay, / a story read to me that makes no sense.” Klink is attuned to the ways in which both nature and social environments can be filled with memories, longings, and forebodings. His curiosity and compassion for other beings, be they human, animal or plant, are further sharpened by his sense of ultimate separation from them.