The latest addition to my website is Max Porter‘s Grief is the Thing With Feathers. This is a highly imaginative book about grief. Dad – we never know his name – has just lost his wife. It seems that she fell and hit her head. He is left with two young sons. He is visited … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Soria Moria. This is the story of well-to-do English families living and working in Tenerife as the beginning of the last century, just prior to World War I. The Hamiltons have three daughters. Two are married but we mainly follow the youngest, the fourteen-year old Dolores. … Read more
The Library of Congress currently has an exhibition of books people in the USA like reading. It is not an impressive list but then it is not meant to be a best-of list, only a popular list. I have to admit that I have read only thirteen of the books on the first list and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marlen Haushofer‘s Die Tapetentür (The Jib Door). The novel is part diary/part third person narrative and tells of Annette, a thirty-year old librarian in Vienna. Annette lives on her own and is very happy to do so. She has had boyfriends and currently has a boyfriend, Alexander, whom … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lisa McInerney‘s Glorious Heresies. The novel is about what McInerney calls the arse end of Ireland. It is set in a grim part of Cork. All the main characters, without exception, are variously drunks, drug addicts, drug dealers, abusers, rapists, prostitutes, murderers (at least three of the main … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andreas Embirikos‘ Ἄργώ ἤ Πλούς Αεροστάτου (Argo or Aerostat Flight). Embirikos was a Greek poet who also wrote some prose, including this story. It is set in early twentieth century Colombia and has no Greek characters in the story. Don Pedro is a rich Colombian, born in Spain, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Taner Baybars‘ A Trap for the Burglar. Though I have two Greek-Cypriots on my website, this is the first Turkish-Cypriot, a man noted mainly for his poetry and for translating Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet. This is his only published novel, a somewhat odd novel about a couple, John … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Milena Busquets‘s También esto pasará (This Too Shall Pass). Busquets is the daughter of well-known (in Spain but not in the English-speaking world) publisher and writer Esther Tusquets. Tusquets died in 2012. This novel is about a forty tear old woman, Blanca, whose mother has just died. Though … Read more
The latest addition to my website is John Williams‘ Stoner. This novel got into the news again, when Ian McEwan rediscovered it, though it had never been out of print since it was first published and was certainly not unknown, at least in the United States. It is a first-class campus novel about a man, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antal Szerb‘s VII. Olivér (Oliver VII). This is a light-hearted novel, set in the fictitious Southern European country of Alturia. The country is broke and is considering an offer from Coltor, a rich businessman from neighbouring Norlandia. He will take over the two main Alturian industries, sardine fishing … Read more