Half a dozen star turns in this year’s selection of the best European fiction

Best European Fiction 2013

Taking the widest possible definition of “European”, the anthology is characterised by the quirkiness of its selection: this is the short story as inspired by Laurence Sterne, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Borges and WG Sebald: wildly imaginative and innovative work, ranging from broadly comic to devastatingly tragic, from demanding to the point of impenetrability, to piquant, hilarious and instantly rewarding.

This year, for example, Ireland is represented in Irish by Tomás Mac Síomóin, a writer born in Dublin in 1938, now living and working in Catalonia, after a career in the US and Ireland as a biological researcher and university lecturer. His story, Music in the Bones, about a man who is compelled to conduct the indescribably beautiful music that he hears in his bones, yet is inaudible to others, is one of the half dozen star turns in the collection, yet in Ireland Mac Síomóin is a far from familiar name.