Verso Fiction: uncompromisingly intelligent and beautiful books, with an international focus. See all our fiction here.

The Destructive Force of Romantic Love: read an excerpt from Vigdis Hjorth's new novel, If Only.

"I want to read about women who can’t make things": read an excerpt from Hannah Regal's debut novel, The Last Sane Woman.

Roughage: read a short story from India Ennenga on the Verso Blog.

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2024 Highlights

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Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024

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A new literary memoir of love and grief

Dylan Riley describes cancer, Perdita’s central antagonist, as a pitiless opponent, draining hope of its power and reducing it to self-delusion. The disease provokes a broader set of reflections on the openness, contingency, and pain of the human condition, a status defined by the context of mortality, both our own and that of those we love.

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The Flowers of Evil: The Definitive English Language Edition

This new edition of Baudelaire's infamous work adds the poems banned from the original 1857 publication to the expanded collection of 1861 and includes an introduction from the translator, acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown.

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Verso Fiction Bestsellers

Highlights from recent years.

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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Perdita

by Dylan Riley

“Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair.” When Dy...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Flowers of Evil

by Charles Baudelaire

Translated by Nathan Brown

Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of erotici...

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