This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist was announced today. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking) The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail) The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre) J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) The Wake, … Read more
If you have ever perused my website you will know that, for each author on my website, I do a page, which contains a biography, links to other sites about the author and a bibliography, which contains links to books by the author I have reviewed. One of the problems occurs when I have authors … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marina Warner‘s Indigo. This novel is loosely (at times very loosely) based on the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. There are two stories being told, both concerning the fictitious Caribbean country of Enfant-Béate. The first starts just before the British take over the country. We follow Sycorax (a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francesco Pecoraro‘s La vita in tempo di pace [Life in Peacetime]. Though somewhat long-winded, this a worthwhile novel about Ivo Brandani, an Italian civil engineer. At the time of writing – May 2015 – he is sixty-nine and working for a company that is installing fake coral in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Rangel-Ribeiro‘s Tivolem, the first novel from Goa on my website. Goa is now an Indian state, albeit the smallest one, but was a Portuguese colony and still retains much Portuguese influence. This novel is set in 1933, when it was still very much a Portuguese colony. It … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodolfo Arias Formoso‘s Guirnaldas (bajo tierra) [Garlands (Underground)]. This is a first-rate Costa Rican novel, which was very well received in Costa Rica. It is based on the principle of a tube line, with each chapter being either a station or a connection on the tube line. (The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Judith. This novel was only published in 2012, thirty-two years after Durrell’s death. It was originally written as a screenplay for a film starring Sophia Loren. The eponymous Judith was meant to be the daughter of a prestigious German scientist and Judith, herself a scientist, had … Read more
The latest addition to my website is T. Rowland Hughes‘ Chwalfa (Out of Their Night). Hughes was an educationalist but, when he developed multiple sclerosis, started writing seriously, and wrote several novels, mainly concerned with life in the Welsh slate quarries, a play and a radio play, as well as poetry. This novel is about … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s 武州公秘話 (The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi). This is another thoroughly enjoyable Tanizaki novel. It tells the tale of the fictitious Terukatsu, who will later become a great general. However, instead of giving a conventional account of a great general, which would have invariably … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s Gli amici del deserto [The Friends of the Desert]. This tells the story of two best friends who venture out into the Arizona desert to find a shaman/healer to help them with their problems. The unnamed narrator has lost his job, in the Italian economic crisis, … Read more