The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s Siege of Comedians. This is a superb and highly complex novel with three main characters and lots of secondary ones. We follow Iridia, a forensic sculptor for the Brooklyn Missing Persons Bureau, who uncovers a people trafficking plot but has to flee to Vienna as the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Akram Musallam‘s اسيرة العقرب الذي يتصبب عرقا (The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion). Our unnamed narrator, clearly based on the author, had a epiphanic moment as a teen, when a French woman showed him her blue scorpion tattoo and let him outline the shape of her hips, while … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Un Su Kim‘s 벗 캐비닛 (The Cabinet). This is a wildly inventive novel, telling of Deok-geun Kong, a South Korean office worker, who gets involved in a project to document all cases of symptomers, those people who show signs of abnormal behaviours. These range from people who survive … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marino Magliani‘s Soggiorno a Zeewijk (A Window to Zeewijk). This is a novel in the tradition of writers such as W G Sebald and Esther Kinsky in that Marino Magliani has moved to Zeewijk on the Dutch coast and writes about his impressions, the people, the landscape and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maria Judite de Carvalho‘s Os Armários Vazios (Empty Wardrobes). The novel tells the story of Dora Rosário, who marries Duarte young and has a daughter . Duarte, however, is totally devoid of ambition, despite being pushed by a forceful mother, and has a low-paying job and will not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sarah Hall‘s Burntcoat. Our heroine is Edith Harknesss. We follow her life from when she was ten and her mother, a successful novelist, had an aneurysm but survived though much changed. Edith decides to become an artist, focussing on monumental works using shou sugi ban, a Japanese charred … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hanne Ørstavik‘s Presten (The Pastor). The eponymous pastor is Liv. She had worked in southern Germany where she had befriended Kristiane but when Kristiane killed herself, she had applied for and got a job in the far North of Norway. However, things do not go well, not least … Read more
Well, nobody expected that! I am glad to say that I have read three of Abdulrazak Gurnah‘s work and enjoyed it. It was, of course, about time an African won it though everyone expected it would be Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and not Gurnah. Anyway, congratulations to Abdulrazak Gurnah and to the Nobel Prize Committee for … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Petra Hůlová‘s Stručné dějiny Hnutí (The Movement). This is a feminist dystopian novel. In this New World, men are sent to a institute – in some cases voluntarily but often at the instigation of their spouses or even simply snatched from the streets, where they are retrained – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ana Schnabl‘s Mojstrovina (The Masterpiece). The novel is set primarily in 1985, five years after Tito’s death but with Slovenia still part of Yugoslavia and the communists in control. Adam, a university lecturer, has written a novel (called Masterpiece) which he has submitted to Ana, an editor at … Read more