The debut novel from this Albanian born author was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and it concerns an unnamed narrator who lives in a plush Manhattan apartment with her husband. He teaches a film course at university and spends much of his time watching black and white movies, and she works as an Albanian interpreter. While working, the narrator often becomes entangled in her client’s lives, much to her husband’s chagrin. A Kosovar torture survivor starts to fall for her (despite the fact that he is married to a woman who is expecting his child). The narrator also tries to help out a female Kurdish poet who is being stalked. ‘Misinterpretation’ is not a novel that ever really catches fire in a narrative sense, but it does have interesting things to say about how easily truth, memory and experience become skewed or lost in the act of recounting and processing, and how identity is slippery. RM

Published by 

Daunt Books