My Heavenly Favourite By Lucas Rijneveld; translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison Faber and Faber
When Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and her translator Michele Hutchison won the Booker International Prize for Rijneveld’s debut The Discomfort of Evening, many were struck by the similarities between the 10-year-old female protagonist and the author. Both were non-binary girls brought up on dairy farms, both had lost a brother in childhood, both had wild imaginations. In that book, amidst the organic ordure of manure and the blood and gore of birth and slaughter, the girl and her siblings are left unsupervised by their grieving parents and run amok, experimenting with mutual masturbation and seizing excitement and danger where they can.