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
The latest addition to my website is Rodrigo Hasbún‘s Los afectos (Affections), a first-class novel, based on the story of a real German family that emigrated to Bolivia. The family is the Ertl family: father, a former cameraman of Leni Riefenstahl, mother, a chain smoker who will die of cancer, and three daughters, one of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo abierto [Open Field], the second book in Max Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War, though the third to be published. This one is set in Valencia in the first part (where Aub grew up) and Madrid in the second part, leading up … Read more
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just posted Latitude Festival’s Top 20 Books by Women. What a disappointing selection! Only one originally written in a language other than English (Allende), only three others by non-UK, non-US writers (Roy, Atwood and Ngozi Adichie) and, FFS, Girl on a Train. May I politely remind them of María … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hendrik Groen‘s Pogingen om iets van het leven te maken. Het geheime dagboek van Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 jaar (Attempts to Make Something of Life. The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old). This is a hilariously funny diary by an elderly Dutch man in a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rosario Ferré‘s La casa de la laguna (The House on the Lagoon). Ferré, whose father was a governor of Puerto Rico, writes about a house and family on Puerto Rico, from the arrival of the Buenaventura Mendizabal from Spain at the beginning of the last century to the … Read more