The latest addition to my website is Eimear McBride‘s The Lesser Bohemians. Many critics raved about her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. I did not share their enthusiasm, finding her disjointed sentences distracting and annoying without adding anything to the book. This novel starts … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb‘s Riquet à la houppe [Riquet with the Tuft]. This is a modern updating of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale Riquet with the Tuft. We follow the story of the two who we know are destined to meet, fall in love and live happily after. He is Déodat, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ian McEwan‘s Nutshell. The novel is narrated by an unborn foetus, The foetus’ mother, Trudy, is separated from his father, John, a poet and poetry publisher, and is having a relationship with his uncle, Claude, the poet’s brother. The foetus realises that the couple are plotting to kill … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ivan Vladislavic‘s The Restless Supermarket. This is a very funny story about a retired proofreader, Aubrey Tearle, who is fighting a losing battle against the decline in standards in general but linguistic standards in particular. Set in Johannesburg in 1993, with apartheid on the way out but not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michael Hughes‘ The Countenance Divine. This is an apocalyptic vision of England with the story told in four periods. In the first period we follow John Milton and his secretary, with the story culminating in the Great Fire of London. The second part features the poet William Blake … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ The Home Place. This is an affectionate though not too sentimental autobiographical portrait of the return of Clyde Muncy to his home place, Lone Tree, Nebraska, with his wife Peggy and their two children. The story takes place on their first day there and every page … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zofia Nałkowska‘s Granica (Boundary). This is a superb Polish feminist novel, first published in 1935, which surprisingly has only just been translated into English, eighty years after publication. It is considered a classic in Poland and should now be recognised as one in the English-speaking world. We learn … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michal Ajvaz‘s Zlatý věk (The Golden Age). This is a superbly original novel about an island off the coast of Africa, which though it has had contact with the rest of the world, has a completely different way of doing things. The narrator, an unnamed Czech, gives us … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Boudou‘s La Quimèra [The Chimaera], one of the classics of the Occitan novel. Jean Boudou, as he is known in French, is known as Joan Bodon in Occitan. He wrote all his books in Occitan. None has been translated into English. This book is a historical novel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s Drylands, her last novel written when she was seventy-four. It is a bitter novel, whose main theme is how standards have fallen in Australia, with rampart sexism and brutality towards women, racism, corrupt politicians, wanton vandalism, the loss of a reading culture and a hard life … Read more