The latest addition to my website is Olga Tokarczuk‘s Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead). This is a superb novel from the Nobel Prize Winner. It tells the story of Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman who lives on her own in a remote Polish village near … Read more
The latest addition to my website is André Salifou‘s Tels pères tels fils [Like Father, Like Son]. Salifou was a long-serving Niger politician but he also wrote many books, including novels. He calls this book a Sahelian saga and it is set in three time periods – the pre-colonial era, the colonial era and the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El mago [The Magician]. The short way to describe this novel would to say it is about a depressed magician. Our hero Hans Chans, is an Argentinian magician. Unlike other magicians, he does not perform tricks, he really can do magic. However, he has been reluctant … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alberto Fuguet‘s Tinta roja [Red Ink]. Our hero is Alfonso Fernández Ferrer, who is fifty-one when writing this book but looks back at an experience in his early twenties. He had been studying journalism at university and he is sent for a four month internship at a Santiago … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Solenoid. This is Cărtărescu’s masterpiece. Partially it is the story of a man who tries and fails to become a writer and ends up a teacher of Romanian in a quasi-Dickensian school in Bucharest. We follow his life – his failed marriage his struggle with is … Read more
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