The latest addition to my website is Eleanor Catton‘s The Luminaries. It is on this year’s Man Booker longlist. Despite weighing in at 830 pages, it is not the longest book on the longlist (that honour goes to Richard House’s The Kills). I was particularly impressed with Catton’s first book, Rehearsal. However, while enjoying this … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joanna Scott‘s Follow Me. This is another first-class novel from Scott, telling the story of Sally Werner (she has several pseudonyms), a woman from near the fictitious Tuskee River in Northern Pennsylvania, born of religious German parents, who does not fit in with her parents’ and siblings’ way … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Colum McCann‘s Let the Great World Spin. This is a superb novel, with its central theme revolving around the other key event involving the World Trade Center Twin Towers, namely Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers on 7 August 1974. McCann tells the stories of several … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Colum McCann‘s TransAtlantic. This novel was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. The novel is in two parts. The first part tells of three sets of people travelling from North America to Ireland – Alcock and Brown, the first to fly the Atlantic non-stop, Frederick Douglass and … Read more
The most recent addition to my website is Arnon Grunberg‘s Arnon Grunberg: Blauwe maandagen (Blue Mondays). This was Grunberg’s first novel, written for a bet and selling 70,000 copies in the Netherlands. Frankly, it did not really appeal to me. It is an autobiographical novel, telling of his life while at high school and then, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eleanor Catton‘s Rehearsal. This is a superb debut novel about performance and imagined performance, about the power of gossip and power in relationships, about who we really we are and who we think we are and about how the younger generation is changing, presumably in New Zealand though … Read more
Just noted that the Portuguese writer Urbano Tavares Rodrigues died today. None of his books has been translated into English and, as far as I can see, all the sites reporting his death are in Portuguese. I have his Bastardos do Sol [Bastards of the Soil] and A Vaga de Calor [Heatwave] but have yet … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Georges Ngal‘s Giambatista Viko ou Le Viol du discours africain [Giambatista Viko or the Rape of African Discourse]. Ngal’s first novel is about the struggle of writing that first novel. Giambatista Viko teaches at an institute of higher learning in what was then Zaïre. He and his colleagues … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ross Raisin‘s God’s Own Country (US: Out Backward). It is a story told by Sam Marsdyke, a solitary eighteen-year old who lives on a farm on the North Yorkshire Moors, with his parents, a grumpy father and an unhappy mother. Sam is a (probably) unreliable narrator. He was … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joanna Kavenna‘s . This is a novel about childbirth. There are four separate but linked stories about childbirth. The first is set in 1865 and is about Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the link between infection and the death of women in childbirth. He went mad and, in this … Read more