The latest addition to my website is Cyprian Ekwensi‘s Jagua Nana. This is an early example of the Nigerian urban novel – previous novels had been mainly set in the rural areas – and is set mainly in Lagos, though also, in part in Port Harcourt, Onitsha and Bagana. Jagua Nana – Jagua comes from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Dublinesca (Dublinesque). It is about a retired publisher, Samuel Riba, a former alcoholic, the alcoholism being one of the reasons for his retirement, who prided himself on publishing quality contemporary fiction in Spanish, with a fiction list which seems to match the taste of Vila-Matas. He … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Adrian Jones Pearson‘s Cow Country. Before reviewing the book, I must say a few words about the author. I decided to read this book as it was rumoured to be by Thomas Pynchon. This theory has been debunked and, for what it is worth, Alex Shephard’s seems to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luis Arturo Ramos‘ Este era un gato [This Was a Cat]. This novel, which has not been translated into English, tells the story of Roger Copeland. He was part of the US troops that occupied Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. While there, he met a whore called Teresa Triana … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fiston Mwanza Mujila‘s Tram 83 (Tram 83). As I say in my review, this is the noisiest novel I have ever read and if you don’t think that a novel can be noisy, read this one. It takes place in the major town in a place called merely … Read more
They have just announced the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize. They are: Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings Tom McCarthy: Satin Island Chigozie Obioma: The Fishermen Sunjeev Sahota: The Year of the Runaways Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life Two from the UK, two from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz‘s Farinet ou la fausse monnaie [Farinet or the Forged Money]. Maurice Farinet, when young, befriended an old man, Sage, who had found a vein of gold in the mountains. When he died, it became Farinet’s. He uses the gold to make twenty franc coins. Given that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mathias Enard‘s Boussole (Compass). This is about one man, an Austrian musicologist called Franz Ritter, who is currently ill with an unspecified disease, who throws away the tablets his doctor gives him and lies awake at night, thinking about various things. These include his unrequited love for the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabah Belamri‘s Le Soleil sous le tamis [The Sun Under the Screen]. This is an autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood in an Algerian village during the 1950s. Belamri is such an accomplished writer that what could have been a pedestrian account works very well. He divides his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexandra Kleeman‘s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. I was just yesterday reading a story about eating fads. While this novel is concerned with eating and eating habits, it only tangentially deals with eating disorders. What it is primarily about is how the media focuses on … Read more