The latest addition to my website is Taha Hussein‘s دعاء الكروان (The Call of the Curlew). Taha Hussein is considered as one of the greatest Egyptian novelists but is also noted for his liberal views and for the fact that he earned academic and political distinction as well, despite being blind from the age of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fernando Aramburu‘s Patria (Homeland). This book has been hugely successful in Spain and has been translated into several languages and will appear in English in March 2019. It tells the story of two Basque families. In one, the father, Txato, is murdered by ETA, the Basque separatist group … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both. This book tells two stories and, when it was originally published, half were printed with one first and the other half with the other one first. The first one (that I read) concerned the Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, known for his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yulisa Pat Amadu Maddy‘s No Past, No Present, No Future. Maddy is known as Sierra Leone’s greatest playwright but he wrote one novel, this one, a grim tale of three young Sierra Leonean men who lose their way in Bauya, an obvious proxy for Sierra Leone, and then … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Personas en la sala (People in the Room). This is the second Lange book I have read but the first to be published in English, sixty-eight years after it first appeared in Spanish. It tells the story of a seventeen-year old woman who observes the three … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miklós Szentkuthy‘s Barokk Róbert [Robert Baroque]. Though only published three years after his death, this is an early work, written when he was eighteen (and, apparently, never revised or even reread). It is essentially an autobiographical work about his eighteenth year and includes his home and school life, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emiliano Monge‘s El cielo árido (The Arid Sky). This novels tells the story of Germán Alcántara Carnero, known as El Gringo, from conception in 1901 to death in 1981. El Gringo is a local boss and is happy to use whatever violence he needs to keep the local … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Bon‘s L’enterrement [The Funeral]. This short novel/long story tells of the unnamed narrator’s visit to a remote village in the Vendée region of France for the funeral of Alain, an old friend. We do not know how Alain died but we suspect it was suicide. The narrator … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gine Cornelia Pedersen‘s Null (Zero). This is Pedersen’s first (of two) novels and she has since made a name for herself as a TV star in Norway. This novel tells the story of a Norwegian girl, aged ten at the start of the novel and aged twenty-one by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergio Pitol‘s El tañido de una flauta [The Tune of a Flute]. The basic plot concerns an unnamed Mexican film director/producer who, in his younger days, had made a film about Carlos Ibarra, his friend and a budding novelist. Ibarra has drifted around the world, never finishing his … Read more