The latest addition to my website is Edmundo Paz Soldán‘s Los vivos y los muertos [The Living and the Dead]. It is based on events in the 1990s in the town of Dryden, New York, when nine people died in the space of three months, seven of whom were murdered. Paz Soldán lived in nearby … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Предела забвения (Oblivion). The Russian title means something like The Limits of Oblivion, though much of the novel is about recovering lost memories, specifically lost memories of the Soviet era of prison camps. The unnamed narrator is rescued twice by a man he calls Grandfather II. … Read more
I have never really understand why others have their annual reviews early in December. Don’t they read any books between then and the end of the year? I certainly do. Like others, I have been browsing the end of year reviews – you can catch up with them at Large-Hearted Boy. I was surprised to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marianne Fritz‘s Die Schwerkraft der Verhältnisse (The Weight of Things), the first novel by the Austrian writer Marianne Fritz to be translated into English, thirty-seven years after it was first published. The novel tells the story of Berta Schrei nee Faust. During World War II, she loses her … Read more
We spent the couple of days after Christmas in Amsterdam. As you can see at the left, much of our time was looking at works of art. This painting is, of course, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, from the Rijksmuseum. and I would estimate that there were around five hundred people in the room when I took … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il nocchiero (The Helmsman). This tells the story of a helmsman, Walter. The job consists of driving a barge from a port, nominally containing animals, though he has never seen the cargo and does not know what is really in the hold. He takes it to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is N. Scott Momaday‘s Ancient Child, another superb novel about Native American culture from Momaday. The story focuses on two quasi-outsiders. Grey is half Kiowa and half Navajo but has been brought up by her Navajo mother. She returns, aged nineteen, to her Kiowa family to assist her ageing … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Лавр (Laurus), a superb Russian novel telling the story of a fifteenth century healer, mystic and quasi-saint. Arseny, as he is initially called, though he changes his name a few times, and ends up being called Laurus, lives with his grandfather, Christofer, from the age of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abdulaziz Al-Mahmoud‘s القرصان (The Corsair), the first Qatari novel on my website. It essentially tells the story of the pirate Erhama bin Jaber, born in what is now Kuwait but brought up in Qatar. The action takes place in the early nineteenth century when the British are trying … Read more
The first part of the title is what was used in the print edition of the Guardian in this article while the second part, as you will see, is what has been used in the online version. It was prompted by the fact that World Book Night’s 2016 selection was entirely books written by whites. … Read more