The latest addition to my website is Jacques Roumain‘s Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew). While not the first Haitian novel on my website, it is the first written in French. Moreover, it is a considered a classic of Caribbean literature. It tells the story of Manuel, a Haitian man who has been … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ciro Alegría‘s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Broad and Alien Is the World), a classic Peruvian novel of the 1940s. Alegría was a fighter for the rights of the native population of Peru. This novel is about the brutal exploitation of the natives by the rich and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francesco Piccolo‘s Il desiderio di essere come tutti. This is a very political novel, telling the story of a man who is now fifty, born in Caserta, who joined the Italian Communist Party, as a result of Jürgen Sparwasser, scoring the winning goal for East Germany against West … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Feri Lainšček‘s Namesto koga roža cveti (Instead Of Whom Does The Flower Bloom). Lainšček grew up in north-eastern Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) near Roma villages and got to know the Roma people. These book is about a Roma family and their neighbours. Halgato (it is a type of gypsy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zurab Karumidze‘s დაგნი ანუ სიყვარულის დღესასწაული (Dagny or a Love Feast). Dagny is Dagny Juel, a Norwegian writer, model for Munch and lover of Strindberg, who, in 1901, travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where, after three weeks, she was murdered by her Polish lover, Władysław Emeryk. The novel is … Read more
This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist was announced today. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking) The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail) The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre) J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) The Wake, … Read more
If you have ever perused my website you will know that, for each author on my website, I do a page, which contains a biography, links to other sites about the author and a bibliography, which contains links to books by the author I have reviewed. One of the problems occurs when I have authors … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marina Warner‘s Indigo. This novel is loosely (at times very loosely) based on the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. There are two stories being told, both concerning the fictitious Caribbean country of Enfant-Béate. The first starts just before the British take over the country. We follow Sycorax (a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francesco Pecoraro‘s La vita in tempo di pace [Life in Peacetime]. Though somewhat long-winded, this a worthwhile novel about Ivo Brandani, an Italian civil engineer. At the time of writing – May 2015 – he is sixty-nine and working for a company that is installing fake coral in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Rangel-Ribeiro‘s Tivolem, the first novel from Goa on my website. Goa is now an Indian state, albeit the smallest one, but was a Portuguese colony and still retains much Portuguese influence. This novel is set in 1933, when it was still very much a Portuguese colony. It … Read more