The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Franzen‘s Crossroads. This is another huge book from Franzen telling the story of a dysfunctional family (church minister father, mother, three sons and one daughter) set in New Prospect, Illinois, in the early 1970s. None of the characters can be said to be evil but all bar … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Najwa Bin Shatwan‘s (Catalogue of a Private Life). This is a collection of eight stories from Libya. Some are serious, but most are satirical, absurd and/or surrealistic, telling of the grim situation in Libya and the repression of the people, particularly the women. We have a cow that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is David Diop‘s Frère d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black). This book won the International Booker Prize in 2021. It tells the story of Alfa Ndiaye and his friend, Mademba Diop, Senegalese soldiers fighting for the French in World War I. Mademba is killed by a German pretending … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abdulrazak Gurnah‘s Afterlives. The novel tells the story of the country that will become Tanzania from the beginning of the 20th century (when it was under German control) to independence in 1961. The focus, however, is on the story of a few individuals when the country was under … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Damon Galgut‘s The Promise, the second in my reading of 2021 African prize winners. This book won the Booker Prize. It tells the story of the Swarts, a dysfunctional white South African family. While she is very ill (she will die at the beginning of the book) Rachel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr‘s Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes [The Most Secret Memory of Men]. African writers have done well with literary prizes in 2021, winning the Nobel Prize, the International Booker (a French national but of Senegalese heritage) and the Booker Prize. This novel, the longest (by far) … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s Chevreuse This novel follows the usual Patrick Modiano modus operandi. A man (Modiano’s alter ego) looks back, both from the age of seventy and the age of twenty. He meets various suspicious characters, a mysterious woman, visits a mysterious flat in Paris and revisits the house … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Manon Steffan Ros‘s Llyfr Glas Nebo (Blue Book of Nebo). This is a Welsh post-apocalyptic novel, translated from the Welsh. Following what looks like a nuclear war and the failure of a local nuclear power station, thirty-six years old Rowenna and her fourteen year old son, Dylan, living … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wolfgang Hilbig‘s Das Provisorium (The Interim). This novel tells the story of C. He had been a good East German, working in a factory and then, at the age of forty, became a full-time writer. He eventually gets a visa to spend a year in West Germany, leaving … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Juli Zeh‘s Neujahr (New Year). Henning is on holiday in Lanzarote with his wife, Theresa, and young children. On New Year’s Day 2018 he decides to go cycling on his own up the steep slope to Mount Atalaya. During his ride he thinks of his life, which is … Read more