The latest addition to my website is Agustina Bessa-Luís‘s A Sibila [The Sibyl]. The novel tells the story of Quina, a Portuguese woman in a male-dominated society. Her father spends his money on women and gets involved in a bitter dispute over water rights which he loses, dying soon after. The cost to the family … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Margherita Giacobino‘s L’età ridicola (The Ridiculous Age). This novel tells the story of an unnamed elderly woman whio is aware that death is not far away. She lives in an upstairs flat in a city with her also very elderly cat. She has an immigrant carer, Gabriela,. She … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Diego Marani‘s La città celeste (The Celestial City). This is a humorous, colourful, (semi-)autobiographical account of a young Italian man going to Trieste to study translation and interpreting and his time there. His main motive is to escape his strict, domineering father. However, in his various activities – … Read more
I have now read twenty Palestinian novels in a row. Initially I thought I might struggle to find twenty, given that I had already read a few but it was not a problem. Whether it was wise to read twenty Palestinian novels in a row is another matter. All of them, without exception, showed to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ahlam Bsharat‘s الاار للناس الغائبين (Trees for the Absentees). This novella follows the story of a young Palestinian woman, Philistia. Her father is in an Israeli jail. She has helped her grandmother who was both a corpse washer and a midwife/baby washer. The grandmother is now dead. Philistia … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabai al-Madhoun‘s كونشرتو الهولوكوست والنكبة (رواية، (Fractured Destinies). In this somewhat complicated novel, we start with the death of an Armenian woman, Ivana, who was born and bred in Palestine. She asks her daughter Julie (English father) and Julie’s Palestinian husband, Walid, who has spent most of his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sahar Mustafah‘s The Beauty of Your Face. This novel is set primarily in the Chicago suburbs. However the heroine, Afaf Rahman, like the author, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. We follow two alternating stories . The first is Afaf’s story. Her parents did not get on and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Samir El-Youssef‘s The Illusion of Return. Our unnamed narrator has been living in London for fifteen years. He was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon where he used to hang out with three friends, though they disagreed on various issues. In London he had been writing a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Isabella Hammad‘s The Parisian. Midhat Kamal lost his mother when he was two. When his father remarries, Midhat is sent off to a French school in Constantinople and then to study medicine in Montpellier. Things do not go well there, partially because he falls in love with his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ibrahim Fawal‘s On the Hills of God. This tells the story of Ardallah, an idyllic Palestinian town and its inhabitants, focussing on Yousif Safi, aged seventeen, still at school at the start of the novel, only son of the well-off and well-respected local doctor. The novel opens in … Read more