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Theme

Power

Fiction tracing authority and dependency — in institutions, relationships and the quiet coercions of daily life.

Reviews filed under this theme.

Olga Ravn

The Employees

An investigation into strange objects aboard a generational ship escalates into a labour dispute the organisation acknowledges and buries simultaneously.

Fernanda Melchor

This Is Not Miami

Twelve accounts from Veracruz move between reportage, testimony and rumour, where the version of an event decides what happens next.

Munir Hachemi

The Mulai

An archaeologist's report passed off as ethnography, compiling a whole society out of one man's failure to tell people apart.

Babak Lakghomi

South

Political injury reassigned as private failure, each record altered before it can testify, until only the safer account survives in print.

Sandor Karacsony

The Watching Monad

A colleague's fear read as desire, alternating narration turning workplace access into administratively easy pursuit.

Claire Keegan

Foster

A summer of care staged as rescue, ending in a child carrying a measure her own family need never meet.

Albert Camus

The Fall

A lawyer in an Amsterdam bar turns confession into control, using guilt to build a private court no listener can leave untouched.

Rozie Kelly

Kingfisher

A debut novel follows a writer’s affair with an older woman, turning desire, illness and care into a question of who controls the record.

Gore Vidal

Palimpsest

A memoir organises a life as social evidence, placing wit, rank and sexual candour under the pressure of what the argument cannot contain: the grief that outlasts every performance of detachment.

Alex Hyde

Exhibition

A photographer watches her own images sell as a dead woman's self-portraits. The question is which of them made the work.

Claudia Piñeiro

Elena Knows

A mother crosses Buenos Aires after her daughter is found dead in a church belfry, certain that rain proves what the police refuse to see.