The Wax Child
Women who really do work magic, condemned by a court that manufactures its evidence anyway.
Theme
Institutions
Fiction in which institutional power — legal, medical, corporate, state — shapes and constrains private life. Reviews of literature that names the system.
Reviews filed under this theme.
To the East of the East
A husband gone to Macau under another man's name, explaining himself in letters that reach his wife too late.
The Employees
An investigation into strange objects aboard a generational ship escalates into a labour dispute the organisation acknowledges and buries simultaneously.
This Is Not Miami
Twelve accounts from Veracruz move between reportage, testimony and rumour, where the version of an event decides what happens next.
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Prison sentences spoken as university degrees, returning each political abstraction to the people required to live inside it.
South
Political injury reassigned as private failure, each record altered before it can testify, until only the safer account survives in print.
The Watching Monad
A colleague's fear read as desire, alternating narration turning workplace access into administratively easy pursuit.
Business Continues: Ten Novels and the Speed of Harm
Violence converted into procedure across ten novels, from a Brazilian slaughterhouse to a predator whose vocabulary outlives him.
Bury Your Dead
A roadside depot grinds animal carcasses while human corpses wait on a morgue van that never starts. Dignity falls to whoever will carry a body.
Dooneen
A wounded man writes from a cliff-cut room as Dublin’s housing uprising ends in massacre and contested record.
The Disappearers
A rehearsal room in 1988 Kingston becomes the site of an attack whose aftermath spreads through aliases, testimony, revenge and return.
The Fall
A lawyer in an Amsterdam bar turns confession into control, using guilt to build a private court no listener can leave untouched.