The latest addition to my website is Leïla Slimani‘s Chanson douce [Sweet Song]. Slimani, born in Morocco and resident in France, won the Prix Goncourt for this novel. We know what happens from the first paragraph – two young children are brutally murdered and their apparent assailant who has tried but failed to kill herself, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Santiago Gamboa‘s Vida feliz de un joven llamado Esteban [Happy Life of a Young Man Called Esteban]. This is a quasi-autobiographical novel (i.e. told in an autobiographical style, with some autobiographical references). We follow the life of Esteban Hinestroza, a young man who is currently working as journalist … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gaël Faye‘s Petit pays [Little Country]. Gaël Faye was born in Burundi of a French father and a Rwandan mother. He now lives in France and has been a successful hip-hop artist. This is his first novel. This is an autobiographical novel of his life in Burundi. On … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sibilla Aleramo‘s Una donna (A Woman at Bay; later: A Woman). This is an early Italian feminist literary autobiographical novel, written nearly a hundred years before Elena Ferrante. The narrator tells of her upbringing in a house with a dominant and, at times, bullying father, whom she dearly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Zamir‘s Anguille sous Roche [Eel Under Rock], a Comorian novel published this summer, which has received a certain amount of acclaim in France, with added publicity when the author was initially refused a visa to enter France. The story is told in a stream-of-consciousness format by Anguille … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Austin Clarke‘s The Singing Men at Cashel. This is a novel that was published eighty years ago but was never reprinted (partially because it was banned in Ireland) and is now quite difficult to obtain. Clarke was part of the Celtic Twilight movement, which saw Irish writers looking … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emile Habiby‘s فاء سعيد أبي النحس (The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist). The novel tells the story of Saeed,a Palestinian man, who works for the Israelis. He is almost killed during the Nakba in 1948, when Israelis fire at his family but, fortunately for him, a donkey … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ The World in the Attic. This book follows on from The Home Place. The two books are very similar, except that The Home Place contained photos. The book is about a visit of just under two days by Clyde Muncy (based on Morris), his wife, Peg, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is J M Coetzee‘s The Schooldays of Jesus, a follow on from his previous novel The Childhood of Jesus. As with this previous novel, the link with the biblical Jesus is not always apparent. Davíd, the presumably Jesus character, has been taken by his guardians, Inés and Simón, from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo del Moro [The Moor’s Camp]. This novel, the fourth book in Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series on the Spanish Civil War to be published, though the fifth in the series, is set during Fall of Madrid, which will end the Spanish Civil War. It opens on … Read more