The latest addition to my website is Andrea Bajani‘s Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins). Our narrator is Lorenzo who learns of the death of his mother in Romania at the beginning of the book. She had been treated as the black sheep by her family and then kicked out … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Klara and the Sun. The novel is set in the not too distant further in the United States and tells the story of Klara, an AF, i.e. an artificial friend, a robot that acts as a friend to a child, not least because children do not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pola Oloixarac‘s Mona (Mona). Our heroine/narrator is Mona Tarrile-Byrne, a Peruvian writer. Her first novel was well received and helped get her onto a doctoral programme at Stanford. Her second novel and, indeed,her personal life are not going so well. She has been nominated to receive the prestigious … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Omaima Al-Khamis:‘s رواية مسرى الغرانيق في مدن العقيق (The Book Smuggler). This is a superb book set in the Islamic world of the early eleventh century. Our hero/narrator is Mazid al-Hanafi, and he is very keen on book learning. He comes from the desert region of Al-Yamama and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Selim Özdoğan:‘s Die Tochter des Schmieds (The Blacksmith’s Daughter). This is the first in a trilogy which focuses on Gül, a Turkish woman, who grows up in Turkey in the period immediately after World War II and, by the very end of the book,will emigrate to Germany. We … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mohamedou Ould Salahi‘s The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga. Mohamedou Ould Salahi is best-known for having been unjustly imprisoned in Guantánamo for fourteen years but this novel, which he wrote in English, has nothing to do with his imprisonment. Indeed, no Westerners appear in it at … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Isabel Bogdan‘s Der Pfau (The Peacock). This novel gives the impression of being written by a Scottish or English writer, being set entirely in the Highlands of Scotland and featuring primarily Scottish and English characters. Lord and Lady McIntosh rent out holiday cottages on their estate and are … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Saulius Šaltenis‘Kalės vaikai (Bees on the Snow). The novel is set in a village in eighteenth century Lithuania. The problem for the Lithuanians is that the Germans, in particular, but also the Russians control the area. Early on, we see a Lithuanian family driven out of their home … Read more
I have now read twenty Romanian novels in a row. The overall impression is that Romanians have had a thoroughly miserable twentieth century. Starting with the oppression of the peasants, as described in Zaharia Stancu‘s Desculț (Barefoot), followed by World War I, described in several of the novels I read, for which the Romanians were … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mihail Sebastian‘s De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years). This is a novel about anti-Semitism which, for a long time, was very prevalent in Romania. Our narrator is at university studying law in the 1920s and he and others Jews are frequently attacked, not just verbally … Read more