Verso Fiction offers uncompromisingly intelligent and beautiful books from international and revolutionary voices. These books experiment with style and form, telling stories that are not often heard.

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New and upcoming releases

We are proud to publish the works of Tariq Mehmood, an award-winning novelist and documentary filmmaker, Georges Perec, winner of the Prix Renaudot and Ghassan Kanafani, the greatest Palestinian novelist, 

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Vigdis Hjorth: A Literary Sensation

Hjorth’s work is precise, moving, and deeply contemplative. In these novels, translated from Norwegian, she explores longing, family estrangement, and loneliness in her trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

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The surreal, the magical, the intoxicating 

The first English translations from the Japanese countercultural icon Izumi Suzuki, cult classics from artist and musician Jenny Hval, and explorations of bodies and breakdown from Stephanie LaCava.

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Histories, Archives and Resistance

Meditations on those who might not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.

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Sing to the Western Wind

by Tariq Mehmood

A suicide bombing is being planned in Manchester, and Saleem Khan, an atheist, seventy years of age, is carrying the bomb. Also concealed on his person is a cache of vivid, haunting memories – some...

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

by Georges Perec

Translated by David Bellos

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bel...

Men in the Sun

by Ghassan Kanafani

Translated by Hilary Kilpatrick

First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'.Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherou...

If Only

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the m...

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...

Long Live the Post Horn!

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman i...

Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for FictionLonglisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureFour siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a disp...

Nymph

by Stephanie LaCava

Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, ...

I Fear My Pain Interests You

by Stephanie LaCava

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New ...

Set My Heart on Fire

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Helen O'Horan

Hope I’m in for a good time, I thought. Even if it’s just for tonight.Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenti...

Hit Parade of Tears

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of t...

Terminal Boredom

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O'Horan

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently int...

Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

Translated by Marjam Idriss

"As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and havi...

Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

Translated by Marjam Idriss

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselv...

Bluebeard's Castle

by Anna Biller

When the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young wom...

The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. Ther...

Happy Hour

by Marlowe Granados

With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York CityRefreshing and wry in ...

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that ...

Faraway the Southern Sky

by Joseph Andras

Translated by Simon Leser

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, t...

Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us

by Joseph Andras

A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have...

The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. Ther...

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

by Olivier Guez

Translated by Georgia de Chamberet

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through Sout...

We Want Everything

by Nanni Balestrini

Introduction by Rachel Kushner

It was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan “We Want Everything” r...

How to Be a Revolutionary

by C.A. Davids

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pang...

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