The latest addition to my website is Zinaida Tulub‘s В степу безкраїм за Уралом (The Exile). This is novelised biography of the first exile of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko. Shevchenko had written a poem which was fairly flattering about the Tsar but far less so about his wife. The Tsar was furious and Shevchenko … 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 Nabile Farès‘La Découverte du nouveau monde (Discovery of the New World). This is a trilogy of books first published French in the 1970s. Farès and his father were very much involved in the Algerian War of Independence but were very disappointed with the outcome, in particular the dictatorship … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maria Maïlat‘s La cuisse de Kafka [Kafka’s Thigh]. This is a semi-autobiographical novel. Her heroine is called Mina Baïlar. She is born in Transylvania, part Jewish, and has a not particularly easy childhood. However,she becomes first a gymnast and then a writer but the Romanian authorities ban her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Minae Mizumura‘s 私小説 from left to right (An I-Novel). This book was written and published before her other two novels published in English and, unusually, contains lots of English words and is written horizontally (as the Japanese title tells us) and not vertically as is normal in Japanese. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fowzia Karim‘s Above Us the Milky Way. Fowzia Karimi and her family – parents and five daughters – left Afghanistan in 1980 after the Soviet invasion and settled in California. This is their story – how and why they left, the problems of exile and reports of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Hayy-ibn-Yakzan (Of Strangers and-Bees). This is another superb book from Hamid Ismailov, the Uzbek novelist, about exile and, indeed about bees. We follow the travels and travails of the fictitious Sheikhov (possibly an alter ego of the author) but also of the Uzbekistan-born, Persian philosopher Avicenna … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mario Benedetti‘s Primavera con una esquina rota (Springtime in a Broken Mirror). This is only the second of Benedetti’s novels to appear in English. Another one will appear in June 2019. This one is set in the 1970s when the military have taken over power in Uruguay and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Burhan Sönmez‘s Masumlar (Sins & Innocents. Burhan Sönmez was attacked by the police in Turkey and came to England, specifically Cambridge, both to recuperate and escape. Brani Tawo, the narrator of this book, is based on him. The story is divided into alternating parts. The first involves Brani’s … Read more