Helena Sorensen

Books Correspondent, The Continental Times

Helena covers books for The Continental Times and has reported from more than a dozen countries.

Review: A Debut Collection Maps the Lisbon That Tourists Walk Past

Amara Nwosu’s “What the River Keeps” follows Nigerian, Brazilian, and Cape Verdean lives on the margins of a city that is selling itself, in 11 stories of unusual control.

Oct. 11, 2026 4 MIN READ

The Tagus waterfront in Lisbon at dusk, the setting for several of the stories in Amara Nwosu’s debut collection.

Review: A History of the Danube That Follows the Water, Not the Empires

In “Ten Countries, One River,” the Hungarian historian Zoltán Ferencz tells the story of Europe’s second-longest river through the people who dredged it, fished it, and swam across it.

Oct. 9, 2026 5 MIN READ

The Danube at Budapest, one of four capitals on the river that Zoltán Ferencz travels in his new history.

At 71, an Irish Novelist Nobody Expected to Hear From Again Has Written His Best Book

Declan Moriarty published four acclaimed novels in the 1980s, then nothing for 34 years. “The Long Field,” out this week, explains the silence without apologizing for it.

Oct. 9, 2026 6 MIN READ

Review: A Norwegian Novel About Bookkeeping That Reads Like a Thriller

In “The Salt Ledger,” Ingrid Haugland follows a 19th-century fish merchant’s widow through the accounts her husband left behind, and turns arithmetic into suspense.

Oct. 6, 2026 5 MIN READ

The wooden warehouses of Bryggen in Bergen, Norway, where the fictional Solveig Brekke keeps her husband’s accounts in “The Salt Ledger.”