François Mauriac

The latest addition to my website is François Mauriac‘s Le Baiser au lépreux (A Kiss for the Leper). I first read Mauriac many, many years ago. Indeed, Le Mystère Frontenac (The Frontenac Mystery) is the first adult novel I read in French. Mauriac is a Catholic writer and it is his Catholicism that informs his … Read more

Uzbekistan

The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Железная Дорога (Railway), a novel from Uzbekistan. Ismailov actually lives in London and works for the BBC, having left Uzbekistan in 1992. This novel is a series of interconnected stories around the fictitious Uzbek town of Gilas and is similar in form to Fazil Iskander‘s Сандро … Read more

Amazon issues – used books

It has been widely reported that Amazon has been granted a patent for selling used ebooks. While the idea is interesting it has, as some commentators have noted, raised a few issues. 1. Publishers have not really liked ebooks and have never really liked the uses book market. They are really not going to like … Read more

Amazon issues

Amazon is not doing well in the British press, because it is evading UK tax by claiming that it is a Luxembourg company. The Luxembourg office employs 134 people while the UK operations employ 2265 people but it still only pays tax to Luxembourg. Obviously, most of Amazon UK’s customers are based in the UK, … Read more

Liam O’Flaherty: Insurrection

The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Insurrection, another of O’Flaherty’s novels set against the backdrop of Irish history. The history in this case is the 1916 Easter Rising, a spectacular failure from the military point of view but which had profound political repercussions later on. O’Flaherty focuses his story on a small … Read more

Seychelles

The latest addition to my website is Antoine Abel‘s Coco sec [Dry Coconut], the first novel on my website from Seychelles and, unusually for Seychelles, where English is the predominant language, it is in French (and has not been translated). Abel is apparently known as the father of Seychelles literature, and published poetry and prose … Read more