Six favorite novels of the past six months
A mid-year check-in & recommending literature in translation
Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Past newsletters have covered the 5+ Club and author completionism, the cure for autofiction, women in translation, and more.
I’m always toying with the idea of writing a monthly wrap-up to review all of the books I read1 but hesitate because I’m wary it could turn reading into a monthly assignment or set an expectation that I have to write about everything, and not just the books I feel inspired to discuss. Who knows… it may happen in the future! I’m always teetering back and forth. But for right now, I’ve been loving hearing about the highlights of everybody’s reading years up through June, and so have put together my own wrap-up of my favorite books from each month of the first half of 2025. Would love to hear how you’re feeling about the books you’ve spent these past six months with.2
January—The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2014)
The final novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet put me into such a slump that I immediately turned around and read a standalone novel of hers, The Lost Daughter, the next day.3 I made my way through the four Neapolitan novels over three years yet felt completely propelled through Lenu and Lila’s story at every stage. If I were forced right now to rank them, I might call the third my favorite, with the second novel in second place, the fourth novel (this one) in a very strong third, and the first novel in last place (we’re still getting to know these characters and easing into their world). The ranking feels a little silly, considering all were five-star reads from the first few chapters. I’m trying to think of others series, as an adult, that have captivated me so wholly, and the only novels coming to mind are science fiction (N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy!). This write-up is reminding me I’m eager to dive into Proust soon, and to pick up the next in Knausgaard’s My Struggle series (Book 3: Boyhood Island—has anybody read?).
For any readers who are Ferrante-curious but haven’t taken the plunge, Kolina Cicero is hosting a community reading of the first novel in the quartet, My Brilliant Friend, over the month of August, as well as discussing one Ferrante standalone per week: The Days of Abandonment, The Lying Life of Adults, The Lost Daughter, and Troubling Love.
February—Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran, tr. Kira Josefsson (Lolli Editions, 2024)
In Shade and Breeze, a Vietnamese family—a mother and two teenage sons—build a life for themselves in Finland. Tran’s debut is a three-time prize-winner4, and after having felt so enormously moved by this story, I wondered how it wasn’t more widely reviewed, or more of a translated-lit darling, when it came out last year. There’s a chance it was just somehow in my blind spot, but in the case Shade and Breeze is unfamiliar to you too, please, let me recommend it!5 When I first attempted to jot down my thoughts on this one, I wrote “satisfyingly opaque.” The novel is told in a series of poetic fragments as our narrator, the younger brother, navigates his relationship with his increasingly trouble-making older brother, his occasionally absent mother, and the strangeness of the Finnish society around him. The prose is dually quotidian and dreamlike. Hazy and sharp. Themes of photography and film, belonging and alienation, slowly surface. Colors and sounds often take center stage. Seasons pass: spring becomes summer becomes autumn, and the days are uneventful until they aren’t.
I picked up my copy of the novel just now to find a favorite quote to include in this newsletter, and thirty minutes have suddenly passed, I’ve been reabsorbed by its pages. I adore this book, and no single quote could demonstrate the fullness of my feelings for it! You may just have to pick up a copy yourselves.
In the shortest month of the year, I managed to make my way through the most books I’ve ever read in a month, with a total count of 15.6 Since it was so difficult to pick just one favorite, I’ve compromised by awarding two honorable mentions:
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is the first I’ve read of his eighty-ish novels, and I’m giving it an honorable mention here for what it does with the slow reveal of story-altering information, the way it leaps backward and forward along timelines, and for its unreliable narrator and cast of profoundly unlikeable characters, who still managed to keep my eyes glued to the page. Published in 1915, this novel feels startlingly contemporary—like it’d make a great White Lotus Season 4 (two young, scheming Americans and two nefarious, beautiful Brits in a German spa town, all behaving badly under the guise of decorum and wealth).
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker is unlike anything I’ve ever read, but if you begged me for comp titles, I might suggest she’s something of a queer, post-punk, feminist Clarice Lispector x Kurt Vonnegut writing from a transgressive late 70s, early 80s NYC. Blood and Guts in High School is a ride.
March—Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2025)
I really enjoyed the majority of my March reads, but I didn’t have to think twice about this pick. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes when it came out a few years ago7, Haymitch’s story reawakened all of the obsessive, impassioned emotions that overtook me while reading the original trilogy at my grandparent’s house the summer after fifth grade. Sunrise isn’t a perfect book—and it’s a strange feeling to dip back into YA as an adult and realize it reads like YA—but this was still all I hoped it might be.
April—The Deserters by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandel (New Directions, 2025)
I reviewed Mathias Énard’s newest for the Asymptote Journal “What’s New in Translation” column in May—and if you’re interested, you can read that review here8—but wow, for me, The Deserters really broke open a lot about what a novel can be, what it means to experiment with form and to have disparate storylines play off of one another in ways that force the reader to do work, engage, pay attention, draw connections. I really loved it. Joshua Cohen’s back-cover blurb brought me to his NYTimes review of Énard’s Compass, which may have to be my next read.9 Cohen writes:
“All of Énard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.”
May—The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New Directions, 2022)
The Wall! I gushed about this one in my last newsletter.10 Haushofer’s diaristic dystopian somehow felt scientifically made for me, me in particular, to enjoy.
And there’s more Marlen Hasuhafer that’s just come out in translation! The novella Killing Stella landed on shelves earlier this month, although its publication predated The Wall’s in the original German. I linked to this in my last newsletter, too, but I devoured the ERB review about “Marlen Haushofer & the enemy hiding in those we have to love.” And when last month’s 4Columns landed in my inbox, I read the rave review by Elvia Wilk, which brought me also to her newsletter, Fast Writing. I may just bite the bullet and buy myself Killing Stella this weekend.
June—Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, tr. Wendy H. Gabrielsen (Biblioasis, 2025)
Working on a slightly longer piece on Near Distance so don’t want to say too much, but I had to include Stoltenberg’s debut in a true favorites round-up. Translated from the Norwegian, the novel’s a tense Scandinavian mother-daughter story about miscommunication, childhood, and the difficulty (sometimes, the impossibility) of connecting with family and those we love. Calling all fans of Vigdis Hjorth, Tove Ditlevson, Susie Boyt…!
If you’re looking for more…
So much of this post has a translated-lit theme, I thought I’d share a recent review/essay I really enjoyed, “Translation’s Drift” by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The New York Review of Books
Recommending these many brilliant mid-year check-ins by Substackers I’ve loved reading, all linked below! Sara Hildreth’s “2025 Midyear Book Celebration” at Fiction Matters; Michael Patrick Brady’s “What I’ve read in 2025 (so far)” at These things, not others; Natalie McGlocklin’s “a halfway celebration of bookish miscellany” at Subverse Reads; Abra McAndrew’s “Mid-year reading check-in” at The Booktender; Kolina Cicero’s “Moods over numbers: a mid-year reading workup” at The Underlined; Ella Harold’s “ten excellent books” at both feet on the ground; leah beth’s “mid-year reading update” at notes under the fig tree; and Nic Marna’s “2025 in Queer Books (so far)” at Milking It
Inspired at the end of every month by some of my favorite Substackers & their round-ups, looking at Martha, Laurel Clayton, Celine Nguyen, Petya K. Grady…
Comment below, reply to this email, shoot me a text :)
Does anyone have strong thoughts on the Neapolitan Quartet television adaptation? Or the Lost Daughter film adaptation? I have yet to watch either but could be convinced
Winner of the Runeberg Prize 2022, the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize 2022, the Svenska Yle Literature Prize 2021, and shortlisted for the Katapult Prize 2022
Its translator, Kira Josefsson, could be more familiar to you, as the Booker Prize-shortlisted translator of Ia Genburg’s The Details
My disclaimer here is that their average page count was a very slim 225
Somehow, I prefer the movie adaptation! could be the only movie > book I’ve ever experienced
A taste: Much of The Deserters’ allure is its language—in a virtuosic translation by Charlotte Mandell—but equally compelling is the challenge the novel presents; one can’t help oneself from trying to decipher the relationship between the two plotlines, wondering what revelation from one story shines light on the other. As each plays out in parallel, these narratives confront the reader with the vastness of human experience—but reading farther is to watch this complexity give way to profound, eternal simplicity. A chance encounter. A conjecture proven correct. However disparate their circumstances, all of Énard’s characters face the natural world, the nature of war, the fact of suffering. They consider legacy, intimacy, forgiveness.
Or should it be Zone (I’ve read excerpts), or Gravediggers’ Guild? Any Énard completionists who have insights to share?
And I loved reading the review Rhian Sasseen shared earlier this week:
certainly will have to add Near Distance to my Nordic TBR......!!!
Thank you for sharing My Brilliant Ferrante! August is going to be so great. I’ve watched My Brilliant Friend on HBO and it’s so well done. I haven’t watched any if the film adaptations yet. I think there are two.
Definitely check out the HBO series! Now that you mention it, I never finished it. I might just go all out and re-watch the series next month too!