tmn The latest addition to my website isAlexei Ivanov‘s Пищеблок The Food Block). The novel is set in 1980 in a remote Soviet pioneer camp on the Volga. Our two heroes are Igor Korzukhin, a team leader, and Valerka, a young pioneer. The pioneers indulge in various activities but first Valerka Lagunov and then Igor discover … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sylvain Trudel‘s Le Souffle de l’harmattan (The Harmattan Winds). Set in Quebec, our hero Hugues is a foundling, unsure of his origins, except he seems to have almond eyes. He is influenced by the poems of a deceased and fictitious poet called Desuet and a fellow orphan, Habeke … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Magdalena Blažević‘s U kasno ljeto (In Late Summer). The novel, narrated by a girl called Ivana, is set in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Ivana. Neither Bosnia nor the war are specifically mentioned. Ivana and her family live in an agricultural village, where life goes on smoothly, people … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José Eduardo Agualusa‘s Os Vivos e os Outros (The Living and The Rest) The book involves an African literary conference taking place on lha de Moçambique) , a resort island off the coast of Mozambique. The writers are all African, primarily fictitious. They discuss issues such what it … Read more
< The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s The Adjudicator. The novel is set sometime in the future with babies made to order in a genetics facility, thereby eliminating most diseases, mental and physical. However sometimes things go wrong and the adjudicators have to deal with these problems. Our heroine, Zedi Loew, is ... Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rafał Wojasiński‘s Tefil (Tefil). A young man looking for information about his long deceased mother goes to a small Polish village, where he meets Tefil, who may have known her. However this book is, as the title states, about Tefil. He is old, permanently broke but more than … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrey Kurkov‘s Сердце не мясо (Stolen Heart). The novel is set in Kyiv in the early 1920s and follows the story of a young police investigator, Samson Kolechko. He and his colleague, a former priest, are given the task of investigating the private selling of meat, which neither … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ghazaleh Alizadeh‘s خانه ادریسیها (The House of The Edrisis (Volume 2), following on from first volume. It continues the story of the three remaining members of the Edrisi, whose house has been taken over by revolutionaries. However the Edrisis and the revolutionaries have reached a way of living … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Felix Nesi‘s Orang orang Oetimu (People from Oetimu). Oetimu is a village in West Timor, part of Indonesia. The background is the volatile history – Dutch/Portuguese, Japanese occupation and Indonesia vs East Timor whihch has seemingly settled down but, in practice has not. We follow a host of … Read more
Last year, when I focussed on Palestinians literature, I commented how grim it was because all the books were about the oppression suffered by the Palestinians, primarily from the Israelis but also from the Ottomans and British. The twentieth century was not too good for the Greeks though not as bad as it was for … Read more