Who owns English? Its post-World War II rise as a lingua franca has made the question ever more fraught. Three recent European novels — Wild Houses by Colin Barrett, Niente di vero by Veronica Raimo and Allegro Pastell by Leif Randt — offer different ways to wield English outside the Anglo-American sphere. Barrett’s prose typifies how Irish writers dominate anglophone literature — or «punch above their weight», as British papers like to generously concede. For Raimo and Randt’s internationally-minded young Italians and Germans, English serves a fluid range of purposes, from facilitating travel to modulating tone through semi-ironic loan phrases.

These novels also take their individual approaches to generational dynamics. While the authors are similar in age — Barrett was born in 1982, Raimo in 1978 and Randt in 1983 — none of the novels deploys the Gen X or Millennial labels that Anglo-Americans seem to feel naked without. Rather what emerges is three specific portrayals of a given community at a particular time, engaged with the broader world but never claiming to represent a transnational globalised experience.