The latest addition to my website is Cormac McCarthy‘s The Passenger. Published when he was eighty-nine, it is clear that McCarthy can still write a first-class novel. Our hero is Bobby Western. Two things initially cause him misery – the suicide of his twin sister, whom he was in love with and the fact that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire). Signe and Asle are a married couple with no children who live in the large house where Asle and his forebears grew up, next to a fjord. In this book they spend much time staring out of the windows … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vigdis Hjorth‘s Er mor død?(Is Mother Dead?). Johanna, now sixty, is a Norwegian artist, living in Utah. Her husband, Mark, has died and her only child, John has moved to Copenhagen so she decides that it is time to return to Norway. However she is estranged from her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zhang Yueran‘s 九栋 (Cocoon). The book is narrated by Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong. They had not met for eighteen years, when they were eleven and close friends.They tell their stories in alternating chapters. Li Jiaqi had returned to look after her dying grandfather, a former heart surgeon. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Esther Kinsky‘s Rombo (Rombo. This is another wonderful book from Esther Kinsky, this one giving an account of the 1976 Friuli earthquake and, in particular giving the accounts of seven people from an affected village. Kinsky lets them tell their stories – what life was like before the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s いたちなく (Weasels in the Attic). This book consists of three linked stories. In the first the unnamed narrator and his friend Saiki visit Shuzo Urabe who had an exotic fish shop which has closed. He now lives above the shop with his wife and daughter, The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vasily Grossman‘s Народ бессмертен (The People Immortal; No Beautiful Nights) . The book had been translated into English in 1945 but this version uses the original manuscript, some of which was censored, often by Grossman himself. It is an account of the relatively early period of the Nazi … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Orhan Pamuk‘s Veba Geceleri (Nights of Plague). This tells the long and complex story of the fictitious Mediterranean island of Mingheria. The story opens in 1901 when Mingheria is part of the failing Ottoman Empire. There has been an outbreak of plague (though denied by the Governor) so … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jorge Enrique Lage‘s La Autopista: The Movie Freeway- La Movie. Set in mid-twenty-first century Havana, this surrealist/absurdist novel recounts the adventures of the unnamed narrator and his friend El Autista (meaning the Autistic Person) around the massive Freeway linking Havana to the USA. The two men have a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Perhat Tursun‘s Chong shähär (The Backstreets). Perhat Turson is probably the foremost Uighur author but sadly has been imprisoned by the Chinese for sixteen years. This is his first book in English and a very fine one it is. It tells of one night in the life of … Read more