The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s Marco e Mattio [Marco and Mattio]. Like other Vassalli novels this one is based on a real story, in this case a nineteenth century Italian shoe mender and charcoal burner called Mattio Lovat. Most of the action takes place at the end of the eighteenth and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Petre M. Andreevski‘s Пиреј (Pirey), a novel about the brutalities of World War 1 in Macedonia. The novel tells the story of Ion and Velika, a Macedonian couple who get married and have five children. Life has not been easy for them but, when World War 1 comes, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Lila, the third book in Robinson’s Gilead trilogy. This one, of course, tells the story of Lila, whom we have met in the previous two novels as the (much younger) wife of the seventy-seven year old Reverend Ames and mother of his seven-year old son, Robby. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Home, the second book in her Gilead trilogy. In the first book – Gilead – the Reverend John Ames told his tale and mentioned the son of his very good friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, Jack. Unlike his seven siblings, Jack had been a wilful, badly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead. This is another first-class novel from Marilynne Robinson and, in fact, the first of a trilogy of novels, set in Gilead, Iowa, about the Ames and Boughton families, where the paterfamilias, in each case, is a professional religious minister. This book is narrated by John … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zaza Burchuladze‘s რომანი (Adibas), another fine novel from Dalkey Archive Press’s wonderful Georgian Literature Series. This one is a supremely cynical novel by a writer known as the bad boy of Georgian literature. In this novel, Shako (aka Gio) is an actor, in between assignments, who spends most … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Aleksander Majkowski‘s Żëcé i przigodë Remusa. Zvjercadło kaszubskji (Life and Adventures of Remus), the first and almost certainly the last Kashubian novel on my website. Kashubia is in the North-Western part of what is now Poland, west of Gdánsk. This novel, first published in 1938 soon after its … Read more
If you have been following this blog recently, you will have noticed I have been reading selections from the shortlists/winners of literary prizes. This was a response to the disappointing (for me) Man Booker Prize shortlist. One thing I did discover is that there are far more literary prizes than I had imagined. Wikipedia has … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emily St. John Mandel‘s Station Eleven. This book has been shortlisted for the US National Book Award, with the winner to be announced 19 November. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, but don’t let that put you off. As you will see in my review, there are a already … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wilson Harris‘ Heartland. This book is a follow-up to the Guyana Quartet, with three of the characters from the Quartet – Da Silva, Kaiser and Mariella – appearing in this book. Zechariah Stevenson Jr’s father, also called Zechariah, had a successful mining company, which went bankrupt when its … Read more