The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Жизнь насекомых (The Life of Insects). This is a thoroughly original book which takes as its premise the idea that insects can also have human form and behave and act like humans. We have mosquitoes who travel the world, looking for the ideal blood to suck, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Edmundo Paz Soldán‘s Los vivos y los muertos [The Living and the Dead]. It is based on events in the 1990s in the town of Dryden, New York, when nine people died in the space of three months, seven of whom were murdered. Paz Soldán lived in nearby … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Предела забвения (Oblivion). The Russian title means something like The Limits of Oblivion, though much of the novel is about recovering lost memories, specifically lost memories of the Soviet era of prison camps. The unnamed narrator is rescued twice by a man he calls Grandfather II. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marianne Fritz‘s Die Schwerkraft der Verhältnisse (The Weight of Things), the first novel by the Austrian writer Marianne Fritz to be translated into English, thirty-seven years after it was first published. The novel tells the story of Berta Schrei nee Faust. During World War II, she loses her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il nocchiero (The Helmsman). This tells the story of a helmsman, Walter. The job consists of driving a barge from a port, nominally containing animals, though he has never seen the cargo and does not know what is really in the hold. He takes it to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is N. Scott Momaday‘s Ancient Child, another superb novel about Native American culture from Momaday. The story focuses on two quasi-outsiders. Grey is half Kiowa and half Navajo but has been brought up by her Navajo mother. She returns, aged nineteen, to her Kiowa family to assist her ageing … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Лавр (Laurus), a superb Russian novel telling the story of a fifteenth century healer, mystic and quasi-saint. Arseny, as he is initially called, though he changes his name a few times, and ends up being called Laurus, lives with his grandfather, Christofer, from the age of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abdulaziz Al-Mahmoud‘s القرصان (The Corsair), the first Qatari novel on my website. It essentially tells the story of the pirate Erhama bin Jaber, born in what is now Kuwait but brought up in Qatar. The action takes place in the early nineteenth century when the British are trying … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jeanette Winterson‘s The Gap of Time. This is the first in a series of reimaginings of Shakespeare’s plays by well-known novelists. Winterson has chosen to do The Winter’s Tale, because, as she says, it is about an abandoned baby and she was abandoned as a baby. Winterson certainly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cyprian Ekwensi‘s Beautiful Feathers. This tells the story of Wilson Iyari, a man who runs a successful pharmacy and is head of the Nigerian-based Movement for African and Malagasy Solidarity but, as the Igbo proverb says, if he is not respected inside his own home, he is like … Read more