The latest addition to my website is Clemens Meyer‘s Im Stein [In Stone]. This book has been much discussed in Germany for its controversial depiction of a fictitious East German city, focussing on the underbelly of the city. The key element is prostitution and Meyer gives us a vivid description of the prostitutes themselves, their … Read more
The latest additions to my website are two books by Ruth Ozeki. The first is My Year of Meats, a very witty and somewhat polemic attack on various things – sexism, racism, the US obsession with guns and, in particular, the meat industry. It tells two stories of two women in parallel. The first, clearly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hans Henny Jahnn‘s Das Holzschiff (The Ship). This is the first book in an incomplete trilogy, with the second book, meant only to provide a tenth chapter to the first one, ending up as 1600 pages. Only this one has been translated into English. Though long since out … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Daniel Kehlmann‘s F, a superb new novel from Kehlmann about family, fate, faking and forgery and various other F-words (but, no, not that one). It concerns two twins, Iwan and Eric, their half-brother, Martin, and their father, Arthur. The twins only meet Martin for the first time when … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodney Hall‘s Yandilli trilogy. The trilogy consists of three novels, all set in the fictitious settlement of Yandilli, in New South Wales. The novels are set thirty years apart – with the first in 1838, the second in 1868 and the third in 1898. The first chronologically – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Berdi Kerbabaev‘s Aĭgytly ădim (Der entscheidende Schritt) [The Decisive Step], the first novel from Turkmenistan on my site and a book written in Turkmen, translated into Russian and thence into German. It is a fairly conventional Soviet novel, with our hero, Ardyk, a somewhat downtrodden peasant. His father … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eleanor Catton‘s The Luminaries. It is on this year’s Man Booker longlist. Despite weighing in at 830 pages, it is not the longest book on the longlist (that honour goes to Richard House’s The Kills). I was particularly impressed with Catton’s first book, Rehearsal. However, while enjoying this … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joanna Scott‘s Follow Me. This is another first-class novel from Scott, telling the story of Sally Werner (she has several pseudonyms), a woman from near the fictitious Tuskee River in Northern Pennsylvania, born of religious German parents, who does not fit in with her parents’ and siblings’ way … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Colum McCann‘s Let the Great World Spin. This is a superb novel, with its central theme revolving around the other key event involving the World Trade Center Twin Towers, namely Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers on 7 August 1974. McCann tells the stories of several … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Colum McCann‘s TransAtlantic. This novel was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. The novel is in two parts. The first part tells of three sets of people travelling from North America to Ireland – Alcock and Brown, the first to fly the Atlantic non-stop, Frederick Douglass and … Read more