If you’d like to join a group reading in a certain language – or suggest a book that should be read – please get in touch. We have a Portuguese group coming up in the spring and hope to have Nordic, Arabic & other groups happening soon.

Oh, and here’s some more brilliant ‘best of year’ news that came out since the newsletter:

3:AM Magazine’s editors chose And Other Stories as the 2011 Publisher of the Year, while Clemens Meyer’s All the Lights ‘stories of brilliance’ were a highlight of The Guardian’s round-up of 2011′s best short story collections.

To reserve your place, please visit www.belgraviabooks.com or RSVP to enquiries@belgraviabooks.com

To hear about such events first, sign up for our newsletter (in the right hand column).

We’d also like to thank the Mexican Embassy for supporting Juan Pablo’s trip to the UK.

Ali Smith writes in the Telegraph that it’s a ‘pint-size novel about innocence, beastliness and a child learning the lingo in a drug wonderland. Funny, convincing, appalling, it’s a punch-packer for one so small’.

Sarah Churchwell says, ‘this first novel, translated from the Mexican Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, about the child of a drug lord locked away in a compound who likes hats and longs for a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus, is that rarest of animals, a book that is, to all intents and purposes, perfect’.

Boyd Tonkin’s round-up of the year’s best fiction included two of And Other Stories’ first four titles: ‘Juan Pablo Villalobos channeled Mexico’s drug wars via the voice of a narco-baron’s son in his touching and invigorating Down the Rabbit Hole’ … while Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home was a ‘compact treasure’.

Booksellers will be pleased to know that a reprint was despatched from our printers to our distributor Central Books just before the announcement and wholesalers have stock. The reprint will feature ‘Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award’ on the cover and the glowing UK press reviews on the back. It’s a beautifully made book with French flaps and nice thick Munken paper. And of course it’s slim – perfect for a Christmas gift?

‘Deliberately unshowy, so that plot twists can unfold in the quietest ways,’ said Fatema Ahmed in November’s Prospect, where Open Door was one of four books selected for ‘The Month in Books’ feature.

‘Deborah Levy’s storytelling is allusive, elliptical and disturbing. Her touch is gentle, often funny and always acute… This is a prizewinner.’ - Julia Pascal, The Independent

‘Swimming Home is as sharp as a wasp sting.’ Christina Petrie, Sunday Times (6 Nov 2011)

‘With her first novel in 15 years, Deborah Levy has taken worn structures and made something strange and new. The familiar elements in Swimming Home are a middle-class holiday, two families sharing a villa, and a stranger coming into their lives. The risk of cosy familiarity seems great – the usual conflicts, the expected twists – but the result is something spiky and unsettling … In this novel, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.’ - John Self, The Guardian

‘A statement on the power of the unsaid. Magisterial … Themes, phrases and images recur in rhythmic cycles through this fugal novel. Levy’s cinematic clarity and momentum convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.’ Abigail Deutsch, TLS (21 Oct 2011)

Swimming Home is also delighting other reviewers, bloggers and tweeters such as Jennifer Lipman at the Jewish Chronicle, Olivia Heal, Rebecca Carter and London Review prize-winning reviewer Scott Morris at Cadaverine, who said ‘the novel unfolds with all the restrained, cool assurance of French nouvelle vague cinema, but this is tempered by an urgent optimism, an unashamedly compassionate portrayal of lives losing their way’.

Oh yes, and Tatler magazine’s November issue has declared Deborah Levy to be the coolest author around. (Page 92, right next to the big Merino wool ad.)

Deborah Levy is also available for readings, signings and talks at galleries. She is an incredibly engaging speaker, who talks with humour and candour about both the joys and challenges of writing and the breadth of experience that has brought her to write Swimming Home and to publish with And Other Stories. Her warmth and intellectual breadth, and her commitment to fiction in the context of a wider engagement with the world always leads to a sparkling, inspiring conversation.