The latest addition to my website is Rupert Thomson‘s Dartmouth Park. Our narrator is Philip Notman, a fifty-something historian. At the beginning of the book he is attending a conference in Bergen, where he meets a fellow and younger academic, Inés. There is a spark but nothing happens. However on the way home he has … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carmine Abate‘s Il ballo tondo (The Round Dance). Abate comes from the Arbëreshë community, descendants of Albanians who fled the Ottomans between between the 14th and the 18th centuries and settled in Italy. This novel is set in Hora, a small Arbëreshë town in Calabria and for most … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rosemary Tonks‘ The Halt during the Chase. This novel wittily tells the story of a few eccentric characters in the London suburb of Hampstead in 1979. Our heroine/narrator is the thirty-one year old Sophie who has a decidedly ambiguous relationship with both her widowed mother and her not-quite … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nino Haratischwili‘s Juja (Juja). We follow the stories of several people, mainly women, who seemed ti be connected to Jeanne Saré. Saré, whose story we also follow, lived a lonely life, writing her depressing thoughts in an exercise book, before throwing herself in front of a train. The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maica Rafecas‘ El setembre i la nit (September and the Night). The novel tells the story of Anaïs whose family own a vineyard. However, the vineyard does not pay and they are faced with drought and disease. When the local authority decided to compulsorily purchase the vineyards in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luis Felipe Fabre‘s Declaración de las canciones oscuras (Recital of the Dark Verses). Saint John of the Cross/San Juan de la Cruz was a sixteenth century mystic and was revered by many but not well liked by the religious authorities because of his piety and asceticism. He had … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Guzel Yakhina‘s Дети мои (A Volga Tale). The focus is on the Volga Germans, German nationals who, at the invitation of Catherine the Great (herself German) emigrated to Russia in the late eighteenth century and settled alongside the River Volga. Catherine the Great referred to them as my … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ismail Kadare‘s Kur sunduesit grinden (A Dictator Calls). Kadare had spent some time studying in Moscow where he heard the story about the call Stalin made to Boris Pasternak in 1934 about fellow poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam had been arrested (for writing poems critical of Stalin)and Stalin asked … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ventura Ametller‘s Summa kaòtica (Summa Kaotica). This is one of the great Catalan novels, which has finally made it into English. It is set in Poel, based on Amettler’s hometown of Pals. It starts both with the birth of the Second Spanish Republic, founded in 1931, as well … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrew Crumey‘s Beethoven’s Assassins. This is a brilliant novel which is nominally about Beethoven (the composer) but is also about lots of other things. Crumey tells a host of stories, often featuring historical characters, some from Beethoven’s era and some from the UK, some modern, some not. We … Read more