I have made no secret of the fact that I consider Rafael Chirbes to have been a brilliant writer and his untimely death a few months ago was a great tragedy. His last book published will be out in English next year. I am now glad to learn that a Rafael Chirbes foundation is to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel). This tells the story of Leopold Auberg, a seventeen year old German-Romanian. When the Soviets capture Romania at the end of World War II, all those of German origin aged between seventeen and forty-five are rounded up and sent to a labour … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kathryn Davis‘ Duplex. This novel takes a fairly conventional story – a street somewhere in the US, with a boy and girl growing up together and destined to be married but somehow not quite working it out. However, to really confuse us, Davis has thrown in both strong … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kathryn Davis‘ The Thin Place, a brilliant but understated novel about spirituality, the forces of nature and the role they play in our lives and the often arbitrariness of life, but all firmly rooted in the real world. The real world, in this case, is a small New … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Stratis Tsirkas‘ Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες (Drifting Cities. This is a trilogy of novels, often compared to The Alexandria Quartet. Like that book, it takes place during World War II, though each book is set in a different city – Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria, respectively. The story is centred around … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gafur Gulom‘s Shum bola [The Rascal, a light-hearted Uzbek novel which has been translated into German but not into English. This tells the tale of a fourteen-year old Uzbek boy from Tashkent, who because of his lies and mischievousness, gets himself into a series of amusing scrapes. He … Read more
The latest addition to my website is N. Scott Momaday‘s House Made of Dawn. This was the first Native American novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. It tells a familiar tale, that of a Native American man who cannot find his way in white society and turns to drink for solace. Abel had been a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jenny Erpenbeck‘s Gehen, ging, gegangen [Go, Went, Gone]. This is a very timely book, as it is about the refugee crisis and is, indeed, the second book about refugees I have read recently. The other one showed that Europe (or, at least, France) was more welcoming but then … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rupert Thomson‘s Katherine Carlyle. Thomson’s novels tend to be dark and are often concerned with people trying to escape. This one is no exception. The eponymous heroine is nineteen years old. She lives with her father in Rome though he is usually absent, as he is a war … Read more
The Saltire Society has announced its shortlist for its 2015 literary awards. While the fiction list has several of the usual suspects – Irvine Welsh, Kate Atkinson, the underrated Janice Galloway, whose novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing I read many years ago and plan to reread and review some day, Andrew O’Hagan amd … Read more