The latest addition to my website is A L Kennedy‘s Serious Sweet. This is another first-class novel from Kennedy, telling the story over the course of one day of two people who are having serious difficulties coping with life. The first, Jon Sigurdsson, is a fairly senior civil servant. He is divorced, does not get … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo de sangre [Field of Blood], the third in his Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War. The book opens in Barcelona on New Year’s Eve 1937. Barcelona is under bombardment by the Francoists. As in the previous book, we follow the lives of a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Daitch wrote two excellent post-modern novels in 1986 and 1990. Since then, she has written only one novel, till the appearance of this one, a wonderful, long and complicated post-modern take-off of the Indiana Jones/lost city novel. The novel is initially … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Una di loro [One of Them]. This is another excellent novel from Capriolo, sadly not translated into English. The unnamed narrator has gone to stay in an idyllic Alpine village, in order to wrote his book on aesthetic theory. While initially, everything meets with his expectations, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Robertson‘s To Be Continued. This is a very funny novel about Douglas Elder, a man who reaches his fiftieth birthday on the day the novel starts and who has all that a man newly turned fifty can reasonably desire, other than a job, a settled relationship and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ivan Vladislavic‘s The Folly. This novel, set in Vladislavic’s native South Africa, tells of a strange man, Nieuwenhuizen, who arrives to claim an overgrown plot which he seems to have inherited. He collects the rubbish and stores for it for possible future use. He sets up a two-person … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Han Kang‘s 소년이 온다 (Human Acts). This novel concerns the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. Han Kang was born and brought up in Gwanju and was nine at the time of the uprising. She very skilfully describes what happened, from the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Quim Monzó‘s Benzina (Gasoline). This is a very funny, very post-modern novel about two Catalan painters in New York. The first is Heribert Julià who, when we first meet him, is married to Helena, owner of the gallery where he exhibits. Though they are married and seem happy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abubakar Adam Ibrahim‘s Season of Crimson Blossoms. This is a novel set in contemporary Nigeria, against a background of violence, corruption, drug-dealing and religious extremism. Binta is a fifty-five year old Muslim. Her husband was killed in religious riots ten years previously and her son shot by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s Coda. This novel is an affectionate tale about an Australian woman, Kathleen, who is getting older and dementia and incontinence are creeping on. Despite this she keeps on going, despite the fact that she gets lost or locked into shops or galleries. We follow her life: … Read more