tmn If you do not live the United States or did not get a chance to watch PBS’ Russia’s Open Book, I strongly urge you to do so if you have any interest in the contemporary novel. This film, funnily enough introduced by the very English (and bearded) Stephen Fry and narrated by the very English … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Irène Némirovsky‘s Suite française (Suite française), a novel written in 1940-41 but only published in 2004. This book is in two parts. The first part tells of a few people who live in Paris and what they do just before and just after the German invasion of France … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s Sebastiano Vassalli: Le due chiese [The Two Churches]. This is set in a fictitious part of Italy but what seems to be the Valle d’Aosta. Most of the action takes place between World War I to a period soon after World War II and focusses on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s Marco e Mattio [Marco and Mattio]. Like other Vassalli novels this one is based on a real story, in this case a nineteenth century Italian shoe mender and charcoal burner called Mattio Lovat. Most of the action takes place at the end of the eighteenth and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Petre M. Andreevski‘s Пиреј (Pirey), a novel about the brutalities of World War 1 in Macedonia. The novel tells the story of Ion and Velika, a Macedonian couple who get married and have five children. Life has not been easy for them but, when World War 1 comes, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Lila, the third book in Robinson’s Gilead trilogy. This one, of course, tells the story of Lila, whom we have met in the previous two novels as the (much younger) wife of the seventy-seven year old Reverend Ames and mother of his seven-year old son, Robby. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Home, the second book in her Gilead trilogy. In the first book – Gilead – the Reverend John Ames told his tale and mentioned the son of his very good friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, Jack. Unlike his seven siblings, Jack had been a wilful, badly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead. This is another first-class novel from Marilynne Robinson and, in fact, the first of a trilogy of novels, set in Gilead, Iowa, about the Ames and Boughton families, where the paterfamilias, in each case, is a professional religious minister. This book is narrated by John … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zaza Burchuladze‘s რომანი (Adibas), another fine novel from Dalkey Archive Press’s wonderful Georgian Literature Series. This one is a supremely cynical novel by a writer known as the bad boy of Georgian literature. In this novel, Shako (aka Gio) is an actor, in between assignments, who spends most … Read more