The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Ялмоғиз Гея ё мўр-малаҳ маликаси (Gaia). This is another wonderful book from Hamid Iamailov, the Uzbek author resident in the UK. Gaia Mangitkhanovna is an Uzbek national, living in a high-rise in Eastbourne in the South of England. In the opening part of the book, she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miloš Crnjanski (Mils Tsernianski)s Seobe (Migrations). This novel is set during the 1744 campaign of the War of the Austrian Succession and involves a Serbian troop under the command of Major Vuk Isaković. We follow their journey from modern-day Croatia to the modern-day French-German border. At the same … Read more
The latest addition to my website is the Sema Kaygusuz‘s Yüzünde Bir Yer (Every Fire You Tend). This is an intense feminist Turkish novel, whose starting point is Dersim rebellion in Eastern Turkey, which was brutally crushed by the Turks in 1938, with many killed and many sent into exile, including the author’s grandmother. We … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eduardo Mendoza‘s Sin noticias de Gurb (No Word from Gurb). This follows Mendoza’s usual pattern, in that we see Barcelona and its inhabitants from the perspective of the narrator/protagonist. However, the difference is that the narrator is not from planet Earth but part of a two-man team (the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nino Haratischwili‘s Das achte Leben (The Eighth Life). This is a monumental Georgian novel that tells the story of several generations of a Georgian family, from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The story is told against the background of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Konstantin Paustovsky‘s Кара-Бугаз (The Black Gulf). Paustovsky is best-known in English and in Russian for his six-volume autobiography Повестью о жизни (Story of a Life) but he did write several novels, two of which have been translated into English. This one is sadly long since out of print … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s Dora Bruder(Dora Bruder; The Search Warrant: Dora Bruder). Our narrator (presumably Modiano himself) comes across a 1941 newspaper announcement about a missing fifteen-year old girl, Dora Bruder. Over the course of the next few years, he decides to track her down, as far as he can. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Piero Chiara‘s La stanza del vescovo (The Bishop’s Bedroom). This book, now published in English for the first time forty-three after it was first published in Italian, is set in 1946. The unnamed narrator owns a yacht on Lake Maggiore and, as he has some money, is putting … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alberto Fuguet‘s Mala onda (Bad Vibes). This novel had considerable influence in Chile, dealing as it does, with a rebel without a cause, seventeen-year old Matías Vicuña, who comes from a well-to-do Pinochet-supporting family and is disenchanted with his life, his family, his school and even, to some … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Johannes Anyuru‘s De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar (They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears). Anyuru is Swedish but with a Ugandan father. He converted to Islam in 2007. We start with a terrorist attack on a bookshop in Gothenburg, where an author, Göran Loberg, who … Read more