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
The latest addition to my website is Esther Kinsky‘s Hain [Grove]. LikeAm Fluss (River), her previous work – this novel is about the travels of an unnamed narrator, clearly Kinsky herself, in this case in Italy, but off the usual tourist track, to Olevano Romano and the Po Valley. This book is coloured by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Hayy-ibn-Yakzan (Of Strangers and-Bees). This is another superb book from Hamid Ismailov, the Uzbek novelist, about exile and, indeed about bees. We follow the travels and travails of the fictitious Sheikhov (possibly an alter ego of the author) but also of the Uzbekistan-born, Persian philosopher Avicenna … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodrigo Márquez Tizano‘s Yakarta (Jakarta). This is a dystopian novel from Mexico, describing a country called Atlantika, where a horrible epidemic, with the virus vector carried by rats, strikes the country regularly. The latest one – the Ź-Bug – has been brought under control but everyone knows another … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maik Nwosu‘s Alpha Song. Our hero, a Nigerian who adopts the name Taneba Taneba when he is estranged from his father’s family, never really finds where he fits in and where is going. His uncle gets him a job at the post office (twice) but that does not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Princesa primavera [Princess Springtime]. This is something of a subversion of the traditional fairy tale. The eponymous princess lives in a palace on a small island off the coast of Panama. Apart from servants, she is alone. Most of the locals survive from fishing. She, however, … Read more