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Carmen Laforet, Nada - 18 year old Andrea goes from the Canary Islands to live with a weird assortment of relatives In Barcelona (as did the author), whose lives have been (violently) disturbed by the recent civil war. Hope for a brighter future is suggested at the end when she is invited to live with the family of a friend from university.

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Nada
by Carmen Laforet, translated by Edith Grossman
241pp, Harvill Secker, pounds 16.99

During my adolescence, in the Buenos Aires of the 60s, my friends and I believed that the only worthy literature in Spanish was written in Latin America, an arrogant opinion that seemed confirmed by the wealth of the writers brought on by the so-called boom, such as Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The literature of Spain, smothered by the civil war, appeared to have survived only in its poetry, and not at all in its fiction. Then, one day, we discovered Nada by Carmen Laforet and realised how mistaken we had been. Written quickly, in barely a few months, expressly to take part in the first Nadal literary prize (which it won), Nada (Nothing) took the Spanish readership by storm. First published in 1944, barely five years after the end of the civil war, it now appears in English for the first time, in a fluid translation by Edith Grossman.

The author was 23, and it is hard to understand how someone so young, within the isolation of Franco's Spain, should have been able to produce such an accomplished novel, so powerful in its story and so polished in its style. With Nada, Laforet broke Spanish literature free from the cumbersome shadow of 19th-century prose and the cold, censored rhetoric of Spanish fascism. Read in Argentina before the military dictatorship, it spoke to us of a state of fear and oppression that we could not know was threatening us; read in English today, it retains, within the now alien world it depicts, a note of warning and salutary unease.

Nada tells the story of Andrea who, like Laforet herself, leaves her native Canary Islands at the age of 18 to live in her grandmother's house in Barcelona, with the intention of studying literature at the university. Besides her grandmother, the house is inhabited by her two uncles, Juan and Roman, her aunt Angustias, the maid Antonia, and Juan's wife, Gloria, plus a menagerie of cats, an old dog and a parrot. Andrea is a sort of 20th-century Alice, fallen into a Wonderland whose characters and rules she fails to understand, and whose maze of family dramas she must reluctantly follow, beset by narrow-mindedness, poverty, violence and hunger.

Gloria has been Roman's mistress before and after her marriage to Juan, the straight-laced Angustias has been having an affair with her married boss, the grandmother (who never sleeps) fawns over her two sons while disdaining her daughters - three of them managed to leave the dreadful house long ago, including Andrea's mother. The maze spreads outside the house, into the postwar city, into the gambling den kept by Gloria's sister, into the university circles of would-be artists, into the dark streets and crumbling churches. Even Andrea's relationship with her best friend Ena provides another twist in the course, when Andrea discovers that Ena's mother was once humiliated by her uncle Roman and that Ena's friendship serves to accomplish a terrible revenge.

Chesterton said somewhere that more terrible than a maze with a monster at its centre is a maze that has no centre. "And it came to me in waves," says Andrea when she realises, early on, that she has walked into a nightmare: "First, innocent memories, dreams, struggles, my own vacillating present, and then, sharp joys, sorrows, despair, a significant contraction of life, a negation into nothing." At the centre of Andrea's maze lies the void that gives the book its title.

Nada is a story that winds and folds on to itself: the haunted house is within a haunted city and contains the haunted souls of Andrea and her kin, each coil deepening the feeling of loss and vacuity of the other. One of the earliest Spanish novels, the 16th-century Lazarillo de Tormes , notes that "there are unfortunate houses, of ill luck, that stick their misfortune on to those who inhabit them". This is a theme that runs through Spanish literature and finds in Nada a sort of apotheosis. Everything and everyone in the postwar landscape is contaminated by a sense of desolate ruin, of meaninglessness. At her first sight of her grandmother's bathroom, Andrea remarks that it has the appearance of "a witches' house. The stained walls had traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls opened their toothless mouths oozing dampness. Over the mirror, because it didn't fit anywhere else, they'd hung a macabre still-life of pale bream and onions against a black background. Madness smiled from bent taps." The absurdity of Alice's Wonderland has become hideous dejection, terrifying anguish.

At the end of the novel, Andrea escapes to Madrid, but there is no true sense of resolution. Within the country, within the characters, nothing has changed. And yet, Andrea heralds the first awakenings of spiritual rebirth, of what was going to be known in Spain as la movida , the artistic revolution that came into being shortly after Franco's death in 1976. Laforet died almost exactly three years ago, after having converted to Catholicism in 1951 and published several novels and collections of short stories no doubt more carefully written, no doubt better structured than Nada , but lacking the fiery genius of her first, incandescent masterpiece.

· Alberto Manguel's books include With Borges (Telegram). To order Nada for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop

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Nada by Carmen Laforet, translated by Edith Grossman 241pp, Harvill Secker, pounds 16.99 During my adolescence, in the Buenos Aires of the 60s, my friends and I believed that the only worthy literature in Spanish was written in Latin America, an arrogant opinion that seemed confirmed by the wealth of the writers brought on by the so-called boom, such as Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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Min Jin Lee, Pachinko - really enjoyed this historical saga spanning the twentieth century, following a family of Koreans who emigrate to Japan.
This sums it up well: 'A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century' David Mitchell, Guardian.

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In the latter stages of Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's patient, sprawling story of a Korean family in Japan, Nobuo Ban, one of the novel's principal characters, allows himself a moment of reflection. He is living a "small, invisible life" in Nagano, Japan, in 1969 - a modest but respectable middle-class existence, with a wife and four children and a job as a manager of a gambling joint where customers play the pachinko machines that lend the novel its title. But Nobuo's unchanging routine and determinedly detached manner hide a terrible secret that plagues him daily: he is not, in fact, Japanese, but Korean - born Noa Baek, the son of poor immigrants despised by the rest of Japanese society. His failure to commit himself emotionally to his wife is at odds with the totality of his dedication to Japanese language, culture and manners, and betrays not just a deep-seated fear of being unmasked but an acceptance of the impossibility of equality or redemption. "Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth."

Noa's predicament is a terrifying embodiment of the anxieties of Koreans in Japan - he stands to lose his family and job if his true identity is revealed - and indeed of immigrants in general. His desire to assimilate is constantly tempered by the fear of rejection, a tension that works its way into virtually every scene in the novel.

Spanning nearly 100 years and moving from Korea at the start of the 20th century to pre- and postwar Osaka and, finally, Tokyo and Yokohama, the novel reads like a long, intimate hymn to the struggles of people in a foreign land. Min Jin Lee meticulously reconstructs the relatively overlooked history of the large ethnic-Korean community in Japan, referred to as zainichi, whose perpetual status as outsiders obliges them, like Noa's nephew Solomo in the novel, to renew their alien registration card every three years: a state of administrative limbo that mirrors their divided identities and condemns them to the role of the perpetual outsider.

The novel's multi-generational narrative allows this rich history to unfold at a pace that is beguilingly peaceful, opening in a deceptively idyllic coastline setting in Korea, shortly after the Japanese annexing of Korea. Hoonie, the cleft-lipped, club-footed son of a fisherman, marries Yangjin, a 15-year-old "as mild and tender as a newborn calf". Their first three babies die, but the fourth, Sunja, survives, and blossoms in adolescence. She soon falls for a sharp-suited man who wears white shoes and speaks fluent Japanese and Korean: a married yakuza, a polished gangster whose divided loyalties announce the end of Sunja's innocence and the beginning of a life of hardship. Pregnant with Noa, her only salvation lies in marriage to an understanding pastor who arranges her escape to Japan, where she quickly becomes accustomed to the life of a Korean immigrant.

Shame and guilt underpin many of the finest scenes in the novel, with every character continually forced by their position as second-class citizens to make painful sacrifices, and, consequently, to consider the nature of those sacrifices. Sunja never fully comes to terms with falling pregnant by a married man, nor can she overcome her emotional and material debt to Isak, the man who saves her (his act of sacrifice for her and her family is not enough to provide her with any sense of salvation). Noa sacrifices his Korean identity in order to become Japanese, but fails to reconcile himself with either.

Much of the novel's authority is derived from its research, which brings to life fishing villages and shabby townships

Although Noa and Hansu offer some of the most poignant emotional conflicts in the novel, the story is built upon the resilience of its female characters, who keep their families alive during their most difficult times, working long hours running boarding houses or making and selling kimchi in the most gruelling conditions in order to support the children. Elsewhere, minor characters such as Akiko and Phoebe probe the nuances in cultural difference in a way that Noa, Hansu or even Solomon are not able to.

Much of the novel's authority is derived from its weight of research, which brings to life everything from the fishing village on the coast of the East Sea in early 20th-century Korea to the sights and smells of the shabby Korean township of Ikaino in Osaka - the intimate, humanising details of a people striving to carve out a place for themselves in the world. Vivid and immersive, Pachinko is a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing.

Min Jin Lee is appearing at Sydney Writers festival 2018, held between 30 April - 6 May at Carriageworks.

*Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire is published by 4th Estate. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is published by Head of Zeus. To order a copy for £16.14 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Pachinko by Min Jin Lee review - rich story of the immigrant experience

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In the latter stages of Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's patient, sprawling story of a Korean family in Japan, Nobuo Ban, one of the novel's principal characters, allows himself a moment of reflection.

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Han Kang, The Vegetarian & Human Acts - both excellent books, if somewhat hard to read; the former tells of a woman who stops eating meat, then stops eating at all, told in three 'acts'; the latter is hard to read, but also riveting, about the atrocities carried out during the Gwangju uprising in the 1980s.

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wo thirds of the way into Human Acts, a victim of the torture carried out during the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea remarks of the Korean platoons who had previously committed atrocities in Vietnam: "Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times." Pages later, we're reminded of a remark made by President Park Chung-hee's bodyguard: "The Cambodian government's killed another two million of theirs. There's nothing stopping us from doing the same." It leaves little reason to doubt the veracity of the novel's assertion that "There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre."

When Park, South Korea's military dictator, was assassinated in 1979, civil unrest ensued and martial law was imposed. Recently unionised workers protested their working conditions. Greater democratisation was called for and the increasingly authoritarian government responded in the traditional fashion. On 18 May 1980, protesting students at Jeonnam University were fired upon and beaten by government troops. Outrage was widespread and citizens of all ranks took to the streets in solidarity. Special forces were sent in but, rather than calming the situation, the soldiers - spurred on to ever greater acts of brutality by their superiors - clubbed and bayonetted students, and fired live rounds into the crowds. By 27 May it was over. Figures for civilian deaths remain disputed, running anywhere between the military statistic of 200 and the 2,000 estimated by some foreign press reports. What is not disputed is the appalling cruelty inflicted on those tortured by police in the aftermath, the suffering of the many bereaved and the long shadow the uprising still casts across the South Korean consciousness.

The final chapter of this novel is about Han Kang's own connection to the uprising. Gwangju is her hometown: her family had moved to Seoul by the time of the uprising although none of her relatives was killed. But Dong-ho, a 15-year-old boy who was part of the family who bought their house, was; and it is this death that functions as both entry and exit wound for the novel. It opens with him helping to clean, tag and lay out corpses for identification in the municipal gymnasium. From there the author spins out into the stories of a representatively selected group of victims and survivors. After we are presented with the corpse of the boy's friend, lying in a stack of bodies left to rot in the heat, Han shifts forward to 1985 and an editor struggling to manoeuvre a book on the subject past the censor. In a series of encounters, she then moves to 1990 when a prisoner is persuaded to relive the horrors of his torture for the sake of an academic's thesis. In 2002 a former factory girl recounts her brutalisation at the hands of the torturers and the estrangement from her own humanity she has struggled with ever since. In 2010 Dong-ho's mother speaks of the emotional legacy of that loss and the struggle for justice. Finally, the writer writes of her own journey into the novel and the terrible price of atrocity.

This is a book that could easily founder under the weight of its subject matter. Neither inviting nor shying away from modern-day parallels, Han neatly unpacks the social and political catalysts behind the massacre and maps its lengthy, toxic fallout. But what is remarkable is how she accomplishes this while still making it a novel of blood and bone.

The characters frequently address themselves to an unnamed "You". Sometimes You is the dead, occasionally it is the reader but often, and most disturbingly, You is who people were before the violence and have now become irrevocably exiled from. This sense of dislocation is most obvious when a dead boy's soul converses with his own rotting flesh - and it's here that the language comes closest to the gothic lyricism of Han's previous book, The Vegetarian (both are translated by Deborah Smith). At least the boy possesses a soul: many of the other victims are no longer certain that they do, and their shame at having survived is palpable.

By choosing the novel as her form, then allowing it to do what it does best - take readers to the very centre of a life that is not their own - Han prepares us for one of the most important questions of our times: "What is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?" She never answers, but this act of unflinching witness seems as good a place to start as any.

Eimear McBride's The Lesser Bohemians will be published this autumn. To order Human Acts for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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Human Acts by Han Kang review - solidarity and suffering in the shadow of a massacre

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Han tells the stories of survivors and victims of the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea

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Iman Humaydan Younes, B as in Beirut - set  in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), this bleak and emotionally hard-going short novel connects the lives of four women living in the same apartment block in Beirut in the 1980s.

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Elana Ferrante's Neapolitan series - loved these!

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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions - contemporary crime novel, about a surgeon who runs over an Eritrean immigrant and is blackmailed by the dead man's wife to run a 'pop up' surgery for other immigrants; about the lengths people will go to to protect themselves, privilege and power. I did not know about Eritrean immigration into Israel so was interesting to learn about that.

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Alia Mamdouh, The Loved Ones - story of Suhalia, in a coma, told through her friends and family who gather at her bedside. Struggled to finish this.

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Anne Griffin, When all is said and done - moving story told via 5 'toast' (chapters) Maurice Hannigan makes to important people in his life, threaded through with the repercussions of a boyhood act.

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Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Interesting for the portrayal of friendship/love of young people and the sexual and social politics of their lives but I found it hard to care enough about the characters.

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Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Slum Virgin - comic novel with larger-than-life characters that has serious points to make about poverty, violence and identity.

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Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John - semi autobiographical coming of age story