The latest addition to my website is Inga Abele‘s Paisums (High Tide). Unusually, this story is told more or less in reverse order, i.e. it starts with our heroine, Ieva, as she is now, an independent woman, in love but finding this love an unneeded distraction and ends with her birth. We gradually learn of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zigmunds Skujiņš‘ Kailums (Nakedness). Our hero is Stanis Draiska who has just completed his military service in Latvia in the 1960s. During that period he has exchanged many letters with a woman called Marika, who saw his published poems and wrote to him. He has never met her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nora Ikstena‘s Mātes piens (Soviet Milk). This is a superb novel about three generation of women in Latvia, struggling with the oppressive Soviet system. The narrator, who shares a birth date with the author, struggles with a mother who is a brilliant doctor but a depressive and less … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zigmunds Skujiņš‘ Vīrietis labākajos gados (A Man in His Prime). This is one of two novels written by Skujiņš translated into English from Latvian. This one was published by the Soviet publishers Progress and is long since out of print and difficult to obtain. It tells the story … Read more
We have just returned from our continuing tour of East European capitals – the third this year and the fifth in the past two years – with a visit to Riga. This was not a literary trip but… I have only one Latvian author on my Latvia page and own only eleven Latvian novels, not … Read more