English-language debuts don’t come much more lacerating than Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, translated by Adam Morris). The eponymous anti-heroine of her own book, Mona is a rising star of Peruvian literature who ends up on a Californian university campus smoking marijuana and popping prescription pills. Her acerbic, outrageous observations underline her conspicuous status as a woman and a writer of colour, regarded by others on campus as a curio.
Mona’s escape route from this somnolent, sun-drenched existence comes through a nomination for a significant European literary award: €2,000; 13 finalists, one winner. Mona heads off to an isolated spot in Sweden for the Grand Meeting, where she is claustrophobically immured with an international array of hipster competitors.
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