The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (Picador, £16.99)
The narrator of this thrillingly ambitious literary chiller is London-based Anisa, who dreams of being a successful translator. But there’s no demand for novels translated from Urdu, so she spends her time subtitling Bollywood movies. Given the chance to attend the mysterious “Centre” for 10 days, she emerges from its immersive regime fluent in German. During a second stay to acquire Russian, she becomes close to its manager, Shiba, and seizes the opportunity to snoop, trying to figure out how the unusual learning process works. What she discovers is a shocker. This unusually accomplished debut is about much more than a surprise ending; the novel balances the light with the profound, combining humour and horror as it takes on issues of power and privilege, class, identity, assimilation and more.
