The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ The Home Place. This is an affectionate though not too sentimental autobiographical portrait of the return of Clyde Muncy to his home place, Lone Tree, Nebraska, with his wife Peggy and their two children. The story takes place on their first day there and every page … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zofia Nałkowska‘s Granica (Boundary). This is a superb Polish feminist novel, first published in 1935, which surprisingly has only just been translated into English, eighty years after publication. It is considered a classic in Poland and should now be recognised as one in the English-speaking world. We learn … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michal Ajvaz‘s Zlatý věk (The Golden Age). This is a superbly original novel about an island off the coast of Africa, which though it has had contact with the rest of the world, has a completely different way of doing things. The narrator, an unnamed Czech, gives us … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Boudou‘s La Quimèra [The Chimaera], one of the classics of the Occitan novel. Jean Boudou, as he is known in French, is known as Joan Bodon in Occitan. He wrote all his books in Occitan. None has been translated into English. This book is a historical novel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s Drylands, her last novel written when she was seventy-four. It is a bitter novel, whose main theme is how standards have fallen in Australia, with rampart sexism and brutality towards women, racism, corrupt politicians, wanton vandalism, the loss of a reading culture and a hard life … Read more
The latest addition to my website is A L Kennedy‘s Serious Sweet. This is another first-class novel from Kennedy, telling the story over the course of one day of two people who are having serious difficulties coping with life. The first, Jon Sigurdsson, is a fairly senior civil servant. He is divorced, does not get … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo de sangre [Field of Blood], the third in his Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War. The book opens in Barcelona on New Year’s Eve 1937. Barcelona is under bombardment by the Francoists. As in the previous book, we follow the lives of a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Daitch wrote two excellent post-modern novels in 1986 and 1990. Since then, she has written only one novel, till the appearance of this one, a wonderful, long and complicated post-modern take-off of the Indiana Jones/lost city novel. The novel is initially … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Una di loro [One of Them]. This is another excellent novel from Capriolo, sadly not translated into English. The unnamed narrator has gone to stay in an idyllic Alpine village, in order to wrote his book on aesthetic theory. While initially, everything meets with his expectations, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Robertson‘s To Be Continued. This is a very funny novel about Douglas Elder, a man who reaches his fiftieth birthday on the day the novel starts and who has all that a man newly turned fifty can reasonably desire, other than a job, a settled relationship and … Read more