The latest addition to my website is David Szalay‘s The Innocent. Szalay is another of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. This novel is written from the perspective of a committed MGB (precursor to the KGB) agent, Aleksandr, who Szalay cleverly makes us think of as a reasonable person, despite his firm commitment to the Soviet … Read more
The other day we went to an exhibition of the superb paintings of the very wonderful Anne-Catherine Phillips. We have two of her paintings in our house and would have more if we had bigger walls! As we were leaving, the owner of the house told us that Charles Doughty used to live there. Doughty … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Peter Handke‘s Kali [Potash]. This book, which has not been translated into English (though has been translated into Danish, Dutch, French and Italian), is another of Handke’s almost dream-like stories of an individual travelling to a strange land which may be, in fact, Handke’s view of Austria. In … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Roegiers‘ Le Bonheur des Belges [The Happiness of the Belgians]. It is both a response to Hugo Claus‘ Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium) as well as to the political and economic crisis Belgium has been facing in recent times. Belgium is the only country … Read more
The latest addition to my website is A. M. Homes‘ May We Be Forgiven, the winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Most people, including me, thought that Bring Up the Bodies would win and were quite surprised that this novel won. While I very much enjoyed Bring Up the Bodies, I think May … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sulaiman Addonia‘s The Consequences of Love, the first Eritrean novel on my website. It tells the story of Naser, a young Eritrean, who has escaped from the war in that country and is now living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is starved of female affection, till a woman … Read more
Yesterday’s news in the literary prize world, at least in the English-speaking world, was about the Women’s Fiction Prize , won not by Hilary Mantel but by A M Homes. Homes’ novels have often been controversial, particularly her novel The End of Alice, about a pedophile. She is one of those all too many writers … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carmen Boullosa‘s Texas. The novel is about an event taking place in 1859 between a Mexican and an US sheriff in a thinly disguised version of Brownsville, Texas, leading to sides being taken by the two nationalities (with the Native Americans, slaves and former slaves and other itinerant … Read more
The Telegraph has produced a list of what it calls must-read books. The telegraph did not publish the list online (the link is to someone else who did) but, as at least one of the purposes of the list is to flog the books to the unsuspecting punter, you can also effectively view them through … Read more
The last two books I have added to my site have raised issues about nationalities, as I have defined them on my site. Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go raised issues about Selasi’s nationality. She was born in London, grew up in the United States and has a Ghanaian Father and a Nigerian mother. As with … Read more