tmn The latest addition to my website is Nicolás Giacobone‘s El cuaderno tachado (The Crossed-Out Notebook). Giacabone is a scriptwriter so it is not surprising that his first novel tells the story of a scriptwriter, Pablo Betances. Pablo had wanted to be a musician but did not make it so became a writer and then a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eduardo Mendoza‘s La ciudad de los prodigios (The City of Marvels). This is something of an epic novel, following both the story of the city of Barcelona from the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition to the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition as well as following the story of Onofre Bouvila. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ian McEwan‘s The Cockroach, a satire on Brexit. He uses two clever twists in the book. The first is from Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). We start off with the eponymous cockroach who metamorphosises into the prime minister, a thinly disguised Boris Johnson, though, at the time of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s Rue des Boutiques obscures (Missing Person). It tells the story of Guy Roland, a man living in the 1960s who has no idea who he is. He has been working as the assistant for a private detective who has now retired. As a result, Roland concentrates … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Talasbek Asemkulov‘s Талтус (Полдень) (A Life at Noon). Talasbek Asemkulov is a Kazakh dombra player and has helped to revive the tradition, which had almost died, in Kazakhstan. This is an autobiographical novel. We follow the childhood and youth of Azhigerei, our hero, but we also learn of … Read more
I have just returned from a cruise down the Danube, into the Black Sea and up the Dnieper. Though this was not the purpose, there was a lot to see of literary interest. Only a small part of the journey was in Romania but we did stop at Constanța. In Roman times, Constanța was known … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dina Salustio‘s A Louca de Serrano (The Madwoman of Serrano). This is the first novel written by a woman published in Cape Verde and the first in English. It may well be the first magic realist and feminist novel from Cape Verde. It tells the story of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Soledad Puértolas‘ Queda la noche [The Night Remains]. This book follows the story of Aurora a thirty-something, single Spanish woman who struggles to cope with life. She has a series of desultory affairs but they do not really work out. She travels East with a male friend, particularly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Margaret Atwood‘s The Testaments. This is her well-publicised follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, and is set some fifteen years after that book ended, still in Gilead, a successor country to the United States. In this book we primarily follow the story of three women. Aunt Lydia is in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Salman Rushdie:‘s Quichotte. This is nominally Rushdie’s pastiche of Don Quixote, with its inspiration more from US TV shows and Pinocchio than from Cervantes. We follow a TV-obsessed Indian immigrant to the US, who wants to win the heart of a former Bollywood, now US TV star and … Read more