The latest addition to my website is Manuel Rivas‘O último día de Terranova (The Last Days of Terranova). In 2014 Vicenzo Fontana is having to close his beloved bookshop in a small Galician town, as the owners will not renew the lease and want to sell the property for development. The book is the ruminations … Read more
The latest addition to my website is László Krasznahorkai‘s Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó (A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East). This tells the story of the grandson of Prince Genji who seems to live in the present day, in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alisa Ganieva‘s Offended Sensibilities. Unlike her previous books, set in Dagestan, this is set in a provincial Russian city, which is totally corrupt, presumably a microcosm of Russia as a whole. Nikolai gives a lift to a clearly disturbed man but when he is stuck in a pothole, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Coe‘s Bournville. This might be described as a state of the nation novel, as we follow an extended family from VE Day to the present day and the covid pandemic. The main character is Mary Lamb, based on Coe’s mother as he tells us in the afterword, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cormac McCarthy‘s The Passenger. Published when he was eighty-nine, it is clear that McCarthy can still write a first-class novel. Our hero is Bobby Western. Two things initially cause him misery – the suicide of his twin sister, whom he was in love with and the fact that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire). Signe and Asle are a married couple with no children who live in the large house where Asle and his forebears grew up, next to a fjord. In this book they spend much time staring out of the windows … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vigdis Hjorth‘s Er mor død?(Is Mother Dead?). Johanna, now sixty, is a Norwegian artist, living in Utah. Her husband, Mark, has died and her only child, John has moved to Copenhagen so she decides that it is time to return to Norway. However she is estranged from her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zhang Yueran‘s 九栋 (Cocoon). The book is narrated by Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong. They had not met for eighteen years, when they were eleven and close friends.They tell their stories in alternating chapters. Li Jiaqi had returned to look after her dying grandfather, a former heart surgeon. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Esther Kinsky‘s Rombo (Rombo. This is another wonderful book from Esther Kinsky, this one giving an account of the 1976 Friuli earthquake and, in particular giving the accounts of seven people from an affected village. Kinsky lets them tell their stories – what life was like before the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s いたちなく (Weasels in the Attic). This book consists of three linked stories. In the first the unnamed narrator and his friend Saiki visit Shuzo Urabe who had an exotic fish shop which has closed. He now lives above the shop with his wife and daughter, The … Read more