We have just returned from our continuing tour of East European capitals – the third this year and the fifth in the past two years – with a visit to Riga. This was not a literary trip but… I have only one Latvian author on my Latvia page and own only eleven Latvian novels, not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabih Alameddine‘s The Angel of History. As with his first novel, Koolaids, the main theme of this book is about how the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco has been relegated to the back pages and racism towards Arabs is to the fore, with the situation in the Middle … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hwang Jungeun‘s 百의 그림자 (One Hundred Shadows). This is a very original work, which has had considerable success in South Korea, about very ordinary people in South Korea, whose shadows behave erratically. This may mean rising up or even detaching themselves from their owners. There is no obvious … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabih Alameddine‘s Koolaids. This is a first-class novel about two forgotten (according to the author) wars: the The Lebanese Civil War and the involvement in that war of Syria and Israel, and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The book has multiple narrators who, in a series of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eimear McBride‘s The Lesser Bohemians. Many critics raved about her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. I did not share their enthusiasm, finding her disjointed sentences distracting and annoying without adding anything to the book. This novel starts … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb‘s Riquet à la houppe [Riquet with the Tuft]. This is a modern updating of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale Riquet with the Tuft. We follow the story of the two who we know are destined to meet, fall in love and live happily after. He is Déodat, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ian McEwan‘s Nutshell. The novel is narrated by an unborn foetus, The foetus’ mother, Trudy, is separated from his father, John, a poet and poetry publisher, and is having a relationship with his uncle, Claude, the poet’s brother. The foetus realises that the couple are plotting to kill … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ivan Vladislavic‘s The Restless Supermarket. This is a very funny story about a retired proofreader, Aubrey Tearle, who is fighting a losing battle against the decline in standards in general but linguistic standards in particular. Set in Johannesburg in 1993, with apartheid on the way out but not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michael Hughes‘ The Countenance Divine. This is an apocalyptic vision of England with the story told in four periods. In the first period we follow John Milton and his secretary, with the story culminating in the Great Fire of London. The second part features the poet William Blake … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ The Home Place. This is an affectionate though not too sentimental autobiographical portrait of the return of Clyde Muncy to his home place, Lone Tree, Nebraska, with his wife Peggy and their two children. The story takes place on their first day there and every page … Read more