BBC推荐：五月必读书单[1]

BBC五月必读书单新鲜出炉。从《卫报》前国际资讯主编查理•英格里希执笔的《传奇的城市》，到特蕾西•雪佛兰的现代版《奥赛罗》，这10部佳作你最想读哪本？

Lisa Ko, The Leavers

丽莎•柯 《离去的人》

Ko's first novel, awarded the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction, follows Peilan, an adventurous teenager from the village of Minjiang in China to New York, via Bangkok, Amsterdam and Toronto. There, as Polly, she works 13-hour shifts in a garment factory and hopes to pay off $47,000 to the loan shark in a matter of years. (She understands the rules: "Pay now or disappear forever.") But she's pregnant by a neighbour back home, and her new son complicates her life beyond repair. Polly disappears when her son Deming is 10 years old. He is adopted by a professorial couple upstate, but he can't forget his mother and yearns to know what happened. Ko traces the disruptions of immigration and the complexities of first-generation Americans with meticulous detail and sensitivity. (Credit: Algonquin)

丽莎•柯的首部小说《离乡人》获得了2016年美国笔会社会类小说先锋奖。小说主人公佩兰是一名闯荡的少女，她从中国闽江村途径曼谷、阿姆斯特丹、多伦多前往纽约。在那里，她化名波莉，在一家制衣厂每天工作13小时，希望能在几年内还清47000美元César Aira, The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof

塞萨尔•艾拉《小和尚》和《证据》

Two distinctly different novellas, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, show the range of this Argentine author of more than 90 books, known for playful experimentation, narrative tension and bite. In the first, a Korean monk meets a French photographer obsessed with "culturally charged spaces" and his wife. He offers to become their guide to Buddhist temples. Soon it seems he's ushering them into a parallel world and they may not be able to find a way back. In The Proof, two punk lesbians try to pick up a 16-year-old girl walking near Plaza Flores in Buenos Aires. With ice cream, witty interrogation and a supermarket heist the two gradually pull her into their orbit. Aira has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. (Credit: New Directions)

阿根廷作家塞萨尔•艾拉的《小和尚》和《证据》由尼克•凯斯特Benjamin Taylor, The Hue and Cry at Our House

本杰明•泰勒 《我们家的嘈杂声》

One morning Taylor, then a sixth grader in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas has the honour of shaking the hand of the President of the United States, an "Apollo" with "copper-coloured hair and blue eyes". A man who is obviously "indestructible". That afternoon the teacher announces that a great man had died in Dallas today. "The fresh knowledge that followed… was a discovery of history not as what happened in the past but as the current we rode," Taylor recalls. The year that John F Kennedy was assassinated is the year in which Taylor, who describes himself as "a repellently good boy like most of my kind, Jewish and going-to-be homosexual", is "yanked from the random floating mental life of childhood and propelled into youth." His account is a precise and eloquent coming-of-age. (Credit: Penguin)

一天早晨，在家乡德克萨斯的沃斯堡，当时上六年级的泰勒有幸和“褐发蓝眸、外形俊美的”美国总统握手。这是一个看起来“坚不可摧”的美男子。那天下午，老师宣布，一位伟人于当日在达拉斯逝世。泰勒回忆道：“这个新知识点揭示的历史不是过去发生的事情，而是当时我们正经历的。”泰勒称，“自己和大多数犹太人一样是一个叛逆的好孩子，有同性恋倾向。” 肯尼迪被暗杀的那一年，他的“精神世界突然从顺其自然的童年被迫进入青年。”他描写了一个真实而生动的关于成长的故事。

Tracy Chevalier, New Boy

特蕾西•雪佛兰《新来的男孩》

Chevalier's retelling of Othello builds tension effortlessly. She sets her tale of love, jealousy, racism and violence in the 1970s in Washington DC, her hometown. O (for Osei), a Ghanian diplomat's son, is entering his fourth school in six years. It's an all-white school where his presence is a shock. The first to notice him is Dee, the most popular girl in sixth grade. By lunch time O has shown himself to be a powerful kickball player and caressed Dee's cheek on the playground. Ian – the shrewdest, most calculating student in the class – spots the attraction between Dee and the new boy, and vows to destroy it. By the end of one school day, Ian has set Dee and O against each other, and orchestrated shocking violence. (Credit: Hogarth)

雪佛兰的《新来的男孩》改写自《奥赛罗》，小说轻而易举地制造了紧张感。她将这个关于爱情、嫉妒、种族主义和暴力的故事的背景设在上世纪70年代的华盛顿，那里也是她的家乡。奥塞是一个加纳外交官的儿子，他在6年内换了4家学校。这一次是一所白人学校，而他的存在让人意外。第一个注意到他的人是迪伊。她是6年级最受欢迎的女孩。奥赛在午餐时间证明自己是一个强壮的足球运动员，还在操场上轻抚了迪伊的脸颊。伊恩是班级里最精明最会算计的学生，他发现了迪伊和新来的男生之间的火花，并发誓要毁掉它。在一天放学时，伊恩让迪伊和奥赛反目，并谋划了一场令人震惊的暴力事件。

Charmaine Craig, Miss Burma

夏尔曼•克雷格《缅甸小姐》

When Louisa takes the stage to compete in the Miss Burma competition in the mid-1950s, it's not immediately evident how complicated her lineage is. Her Jewish father Benny was serving as a British customs officer in 1939 when he first spotted her mother Khim, a member of the Karen ethnic minority persecuted for centuries by the Bamar majority. When the Japanese occupied Burma during World War Two, the couple fled to the east to find shelter with Khim's Karen community. Benny is imprisoned, and Khim does what she must to survive. In 1948, after independence, they both support the Karen leaders in what evolves into a decades-long civil war. Craig draws from her own family history for this riveting account of the treacheries, fractures, and courageous acts of wartime. (Credit: Grove Press)

上世纪50年代中期，当路易莎站在舞台上竞选缅甸小姐时，并没有马上发现她的血统有多么复杂。她的犹太人父亲是一名英国海关官员，1939年，父亲本尼第一次遇见母亲金。金是克伦族人，克伦族受缅甸主体民族缅族的迫害。二战期间日本占领缅甸时，这对夫妻和克伦族人逃往缅甸东部寻找避难之地。本尼被囚禁，金不得不想办法生存。1948年缅甸独立后，在长达数十年的内战中，这对夫妇都支持克伦族领导人。克雷格通过描写自己家族的历史，生动讲述了战争时期的背叛、分裂以英勇的故事。

Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

帕翠莎•洛克伍德《神父爸爸回忆录》

Poet Patricia Lockwood's father was a Catholic priest, ordained after fitting through an ecclesiastical loophole – he was a married Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism, thus eligible to apply to Rome for a dispensation, study for the priesthood and be ordained while keeping his wife and children. He was also "congenitally naughty", she writes in this probing and often hilarious memoir, which begins when she and her husband Jason, "penniless and exhausted", spend a year living with her eccentric parents in his Kansas City rectory. The flow of memory and meditation that follows careens between her girlhood and now, when she's been dubbed the "smutty metaphor queen" by the New York Times. And the beginnings of that poetic gift? Lockwood simply describes it as "that jolt of connection when the language turns itself inside out, when two words suddenly profess they're related to each other, or wish to be married, or were in league all along." (Credit: Riverhead)

诗人帕翠莎•洛克伍德的父亲是一名天主教神父，他是钻了基督教会的空子才被任命为天主教神父。在成为天主教徒前，他是一个已婚的路德教会牧师。因此，他有资格申请到罗马获得特许，学习成为神父，并在有妻儿的情况下获得任免。洛克伍德的回忆录内容深入而幽默，她在书中写道，自己的父亲还是个“生性顽劣”的人。开始写这本书时，洛克伍德和丈夫杰森“身无分文、精疲力竭”，他们在堪萨斯城的娘家和她古怪的父母住了一年。从少女时代起，她就从记忆中迸发出沉思，直到现在，洛克伍德已被《纽约时报》称为“荤段子隐喻女王”。她什么时候开启作诗天赋的呢？洛克伍德形容“那种开窍的感觉出现时，两个单词会突然自动联系在一起，或想要结合，或者一直连在一起，那些语句会自己蹦出来。”

Barbara Gowdy, Little Sister

巴巴拉•高迪《小妹妹》

Gowdy is a magical storyteller. In her latest novel, Rose Bowan, who manages her family's cinema in Toronto, begins to experience out-of-body episodes triggered by thunderstorms. She becomes another person – Harriet Smith – and experiences everything Harriet does through her own body, from sharper eyesight to satisfying sex. Harriet is a real person; Rose tracks her, while her boyfriend Victor, a meteorologist, helps research her possible condition – and forecasts weeks of storms ahead. Fiona, her mother, is falling into dementia – losing herself while Rose is "finding another self". When Harriet begins to resemble her sister Ava, who died in an accident when they were young, Rose is pulled into a vortex of memory. Little Sister is a gem, powered by Gowdy's incredible fabulist imagination. (Credit: Tin House)

高迪是一名神奇的故事叙述者。在她最新的小说《小妹妹》中，罗丝•柏万在多伦多管理家族的电影院，她开始因为雷雨天气而出现灵魂出窍的经历。她成为另一个人——哈丽特•史密斯，从更加清晰的视力到性满足，罗丝在哈丽特的身体里体验了她所做的一切。哈丽特是真实存在的人；罗丝开始追踪哈丽特，而她的男朋友——气象学家维克多帮她研究可能出现这种情况的原因，并提前数周预测暴风雨天气。在罗丝“寻找另一个自我”时，她的母亲菲奥娜得了老年痴呆，正在“丧失自我”。哈丽特的妹妹小时候死于一场意外，当哈丽特长得开始像妹妹时，罗丝被卷入一场记忆的漩涡。高迪预言家般惊人的想象力让《小妹妹》成为一部佳作。

Antonio Di Benedetto, Nest in the Bones

安东尼奥•迪•班内德托《以骨为巢》

This dark, idiosyncratic collection is the first in English by the writer Roberto Bolano called "one of the greatest writers of Latin America". Translated from the Spanish by Martina Broner, it includes work from his early days in Argentina, where he was imprisoned and tortured during the 'Dirty War', through his exile in Spain. In the title story, a young boy turns his head into a nest of birds – "blissful sparrows, canaries and partridges" – who are supplanted by "unaccountably voracious" vultures. "They hurt dreadfully, they hurt down to the bone," he writes. In other stories, an imprisoned man dreams that the guard won't let him rest, a man returned from exile feels like a stranger in his homeland, and Di Benedetto makes a sly reference to Borges, who, along with Pirandello and Dostoevsky, were early influences. (Credit: Archipelago Books)

这部暗黑、怪异的作品集是作家罗贝托•波拉尼奥的首部英文作品。他被誉为“最伟大的拉丁美洲作家之一”。该书由玛蒂娜•布罗内尔Charlie English, The Storied City

查理•英格里希《传奇的城市》

The former head of international news at the Guardian, English begins his story with the near mythic quest by English explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, who set off from Tripoli in 1825 to become the first European to reach the fabled city of Timbuktu. He survives a vicious attack by a group of Tuareg and a yellow fever epidemic to reach his destination, writes back to his command of finding abundant records there, and then disappears from history. The "manuscripts of Timbuktu," English notes, were thought to have been destroyed in 2017 by rebels who trashed Timbuktu's monuments. English writes vividly of explorations of the past and complications of the present, with a focus on the Indiana Jones-style account of the evacuation of the manuscripts, spearheaded by a courageous librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara. (Credit: Riverhead)

《卫报》国际资讯前主编查理•英格里希以英国探险家亚历山大•戈登•莱因一次近乎神秘的探险开始了他的故事。1825年，莱因由的黎波里出发，他从图阿雷格人恶意的袭击和一场黄热病中幸存下来，到达了目的地，成为第一个到达传说中的城市——廷巴克图的欧洲人。他写信给指挥站说发现了大量记录，然后他就从历史中消失了。人们认为，在2017年反政府武装摧毁廷巴克图时，这本“廷巴克图手稿”就已经被他们损毁。英格里希生动地描写了对历史的探索和混乱的现实。他以印第安纳琼斯式的风格着重讲述了勇敢的图书馆管理员Abdel Kader Haidara牵头撤离手稿的行动。

Agnete Friis, What My Body Remembers

阿格奈泰•斐瑞斯《我的身体记住的》

The first solo novel by Friis, translated from the Danish by Lindy Falk van Rooyen, measures up to the best-selling Nordic noir novel The Boy in the Suitcase she co-authored with Lene Kaaberbøl. Ella Nygaard, 27, is a flawed, memorable character. She has been a ward of the Danish foster care system since she was seven years old. "My father had blown my mother's brains out," she explains. Troubled by post-traumatic stress disorder, which she tries to fight off with drugs and drink, Ella faces having her own son Alex raised in foster care. She fights back, taking Alex to the coastal community in northern Denmark where her own family was destroyed by violence. Under continual scrutiny by neighbours and befriended by strangers who seem eerily familiar, she experiences a series of revelations that grow ever more threatening. (Credit: Soho Crime)

《我的身体记住的》是阿格奈泰•斐瑞斯第一部独自创作的小说，由林迪•福尔克•范•罗延