The latest addition to my website is Oğuz Atay‘s Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected). This is the great Turkish post-modernist novel which, sadly, only appeared (and quickly disappeared) in English in a print run of 200 copies in 2017. Superficially, it is the story of a Turkish engineer, Turgut, who is trying to find out about a … Read more
Every year, around this time, I read books only from one country. This year I have chosen Turkey. It is no secret that Turkey is currently in turmoil, with massive repression of journalists and anyone opposing President Erdoğan. The only two Turkish writers on my site at the moment – Orhan Pamuk and Ece Temelkuran … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dawn Powell‘s The Wicked Pavilion. This is another wicked mocking of New York society from Powell, this one set around the Café Julien, where all the characters pass through at some time during the book. We follow tales of love gone wrong, ambitious people thwarted in their ambitions, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mo Yan‘s 四十一炮 (Pow!). This story follows Mo Yan’s usual style – conflict in his small town. In this case, our narrator, the meat-obsessed Luo Xiaotong lives with his parents. His father, Luo Tong, runs off with another woman. His mother, Yang Yuzhen, is determined to succeed without … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Uwe Tellkamp‘s Der Turm (The Tower). This is a monumental novel – around a thousand pages long – which follows the lives of an extended, middle class family in the German Democratic Republic, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tellkamp’s aim is clear – to utterly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Héctor Abad Faciolince‘s Basura [Rubbish]. The unnamed narrator moves into a flat and sees that one of his fellow residents is Bernardo Davanzati, who published a couple of novels some time ago but has now seemingly disappeared. While looking in the rubbish for a magazine he mistakenly threw … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Chloe Aridjis‘ Sea Monsters. It tells the story of Luisa, a seventeen year old Mexican girl in 1988. She has no siblings and few friends. She is not close to her parents, who have their own preoccupations. She is not particularly interested in her school work or her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is John Lanchester‘s The Wall. This is a post-apocalyptic novel about a country which has a wall entirely round its coastline (some 10,000 km) to keep out refugees. The country is presumably based on Britain. There has been an event called The Change, which has involved major flooding all … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Manuel Vilas‘ Ordesa. This book has had considerable success in Spain, both commercially and critically. It is essentially autobiographical, a tale recounted by Vilas after his divorce, in which he examines the lives of his parents, of himself and of his sons and links the events and circumstances … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Edward Upward‘s No Home But the Struggle. This is the final book in Upward’s Spiral Ascent trilogy. He and his wife have now left the Communist Party, feeling that it has betrayed its ideals and have also become aware of the crimes of Stalin and the faults of … Read more