The latest addition to my website is Shamsur Rahman Faruqi‘s اند تھے سر آسما (The Mirror of Beauty). This has been hailed as one of the great Urdu novels. It was published in Urdu in 2006 and has now been translated into English by the author, a mammoth task as the book is over 950 … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nadifa Mohamed‘s Black Mamba Boy. Mohamed is one of the Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, though she is Somali and this novel is very much a Somali novel. It tells the story of her grandfather, Jama Mohamed, and his difficult but adventurous life growing up in the 1930s … Read more
They have announced the Man Booker long list for 2013. Every year, I vow that I shall keep away from it and every year I succumb. I have only read one of the books but will probably read more. I would guess that the two Irish men – Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín must be … Read more
The latest addition to my website is
In the twentieth century, as far as I was concerned, the most interesting novel writing was coming from the United States. This is not to say that there was not a lot of interesting novels been written elsewhere – of course there was – but that, overall, the US had the most interesting, innovative writers. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kossi Efoui‘s La fabrique de cérémonies [The Ceremony Factory], the first Togolese novel on my website. It tells the story of Edgar Fall, a Togolese translator, who had studied in the Soviet Union but lost his scholarship when the Soviet Union collapsed and now lives in a small … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jim Crace‘s Harvest. Crace has said that this is his final novel. It is an excellent novel, telling the story of an unnamed (not only by the author but by the characters) village somewhere in England, at the time of the enclosure of the common land. At the … Read more
The Candidates for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature are always an interesting collection and I was glad to note that I have four of them on my site: César Aira, Mia Couto, Duong Thu Huong and Haruki Murakami. I know nothing about the three poets nominated – Edouard Maunick, Ilya Kaminsky and Ghassan Zaqtan, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Xiaolu Guo‘s 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. Though nominally written in English, it was in fact her first novel published in Chinese. However, when it was translated into English, she decided to rewrite the English so it is a sort of newish novel. It tells the story … Read more
I have to confess that we read the Telegraph at the weekend, primarily for the crossword, a Saturday morning treat, Helen Yemm‘s gardening column and, of course, to get a perspective on what the old colonels are thinking this week. We even visited Helen Yemm’s garden when she had an open day a few weeks … Read more