The latest addition to my website is Andrew Crumey‘s Beethoven’s Assassins. This is a brilliant novel which is nominally about Beethoven (the composer) but is also about lots of other things. Crumey tells a host of stories, often featuring historical characters, some from Beethoven’s era and some from the UK, some modern, some not. We … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Langley‘s The Variations. The book tells the story of people affected with the gift and the Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which cares for them. The gift means that they can commune with the dead and are attuned to musical resonances (and are often talented musicians). However … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Брисбен (Brisbane). The story is told in alternating chapters, the first telling of the early life of our hero Gleb Yanovsky, till he becomes famous as a musician, and the second from, 2012 when three key events change his life. He is born and bred in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Adelle Stripe & Lias Saoudi‘s Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure. This book is a fictional biography and an alternative version of historic events about Fat White Family, a contemporary English rock/punk band. The book is told in the third person (presumably by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wolf Wondratschek:‘s Selbstbild mit russischem Klavier (Self-Portrait with Russian Piano). The unnamed Austrian narrator meets Suvorin, a retired Russian classical pianist in a café and they become friends, meeting regularly in a Italian restaurant. Much of the novel is Suvorin recounting his life, his views on various matters, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is David Mitchell‘s Utopia Avenue. The story starts in January 1967 in London and tells how a group is formed by a Canadian manager of four different characters, three men and one woman and the various trials and tribulations they face including but not limited to sex, drugs, family … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Margo Glantz‘s El rastro (The Wake). This is one of two of her novels that have been translated into English. This novel is narrated by Nora Garcia, a professional cellist, who is attending the funeral of her late ex-husband, Juan. He had been a famous composer and pianist. … Read more
One the pleasures on our holiday in New Zealand was meeting lots of nice people, such as the people in the bookshops mentioned in the previous post. One other very nice person we did meet was when we visited Fox Glacier (not very good photo at right). We saw him eagerly photographing everything – plants, … Read more