The latest addition to my website is Esther Kinsky‘s Rombo (Rombo. This is another wonderful book from Esther Kinsky, this one giving an account of the 1976 Friuli earthquake and, in particular giving the accounts of seven people from an affected village. Kinsky lets them tell their stories – what life was like before the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s いたちなく (Weasels in the Attic). This book consists of three linked stories. In the first the unnamed narrator and his friend Saiki visit Shuzo Urabe who had an exotic fish shop which has closed. He now lives above the shop with his wife and daughter, The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is A. M. Homes‘ The Unfolding. Homes tells two linked stories relating to the Hitchens family. The family is the Big Guy (we never learn his real first name), a very successful and rich businessman, his wife Charlotte, an alcoholic who feels her whole life has just been as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb: Le livre des soeurs [The Book of the Sisters]. The book tells of Tristane, born to parents who are more interested in one another than they are in their daughter so she is often left to her own devices. She teaches herself to speak, to read … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sylvie Germain‘s Jours de colère (Days of Anger). This book, a reissue by publishers Dedalus, is a classic modern French novel, mixing Gothic and Greek tragedy in a remote wooded area of France. Ambroise Maupertuis witnesses an altercation between Vincent Corvol and his wife Catherine and blackmails him … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Brenda Lozano‘s Brujas (Witches). We follow the story of three Mexican women. Paloma is, in fact, a muxe, assigned male at birth but who dresses and behaves in ways otherwise associated with women. She starts off as Gaspar, following the family tradition of being a curandero, a traditional … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ulrike Almut Sandig‘s Monster wie wir (Monsters Like Us). The novel is narrated by Ruth, now a successful violinist to her almost invisible (in this novel) Finnish boyfriend Voitto. Ruth grew up in East Germany where she met Viktor at school and the two became friends. However, they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s 工場 (The Factory)>. We follow the stories of three employees as they go to work at the Factory and are still there, in the same jobs, fifteen years later. Their jobs seem mundane – one shreds documents one proofreads and one is meant to be developing … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rachael McGill‘s Fair Trade Heroin. Gwen is an aid worker in Afghanistan in the 1990s, just as the Taliban are taking over. While other aid agencies are moving out, Gwen wants to help the people of a village and, in particular, the women, by offering them alternative employment … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Najwa Barakat‘s مستر نون (Mister N). Mister N is a failed Lebanese writer who currently lives in a hotel, rarely leaving it. We gradually learn his story – horrors of the Lebanese Civil War, a mother he hated as she much preferred his older brother, Sa’id, now a … Read more