The Return
by Roberto Bolaño
The Week
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I Curse the River of Time
by Per Petterson
(Graywolf Press, $23)
The newest novel from the Norwegian author of Out Stealing Horses presents “a depressing and uneventful tale,” said Drew Toal in Time Out New York. But Petterson is a master of “conveying the unsaid.” As this book’s antihero confronts divorce, the imminent death of his mother, and the collapse of communism (along with his lifelong faith in it), his sorrow is devastating. He mewls like “a child with a skinned knee,” and we wonder how he’ll ever move on.
Villain
by Shuichi Yoshida
(Pantheon, $26)
The first of Shuichi Yoshida’s crime novels to be translated into English requires close attention, said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. Yoshida is less interested in the mystery of who strangled a young saleswoman than in how this crime affects everyone from casual friends to the chief suspects. The shifting points of view aren’t easy to follow, but they create a convincing portrait of today’s Japan as a place where “loneliness drives people to acts they wouldn’t otherwise consider.”
The Ice Princess
by Camilla Läckberg
(Pegasus, $26)
Here’s proof that not every Swedish thriller is worth reading, said Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times. Camilla Läckberg’s debut was hugely popular in Scandinavia, even though it founders following a promising start. Its “insipid heroine” is a struggling writer who returns to her fast-changing fishing village to discover that a childhood friend has been murdered. The village politics are intriguing, but simplistic characters and a clumsy translation doom this “overblown potboiler.”