tmn The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Melocotones helados [Frozen Peaches]. This is a complex multi-generational novel which won the Premio Planeta in 1999. The first generation focuses on Esteban, who fought on the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the war, he goes to Desrein (all town … Read more
The latest addition to my website is C E Morgan‘s The Sport of Kings. This novel has already received lots of rave reviews, generally deservedly so. It is a first-class novel about sex, racial politics, horse racing, incest, South vs North (in the USA), families, the failure of the American Dream and the striving to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Salter‘s All That Is. This novel was published shortly before his death but thirty-four years after his last novel. The main character is Philip Bowman, born, like Salter, in 1925. Like virtually all the characters in the book – and there are a lot – he is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antal Szerb‘s Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight). This is a wonderfully written book about a man, Mihály, who struggles to cope with life and is obsessed with death. As a child, he had been part of a small group – a brother and sister, Éva and Tamás, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Han Kang‘s 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian). This book won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. It is a disturbing but superbly written novel. Yeong-hye, a Korean woman, married to Mr. Cheong, is seemingly a good and conventional wife. Suddenly, as the result of an unpleasant dream (she will have … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il doppio regno (The Dual Realm). This is another strange novel from Capriolo. It is a diary written by an Italian woman aged around thirty who does not remember her name and has something of a hazy recollection of the events that led to this situation. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Irlanda (Irlanda). Freire’s first novel is the only one of her novels to be translated into English. It tells the story of Natalia, a teenage girl whose sister, Sagrario, dies at the the beginning of the novel, after a long illness. She is invited to spend … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antal Szerb‘s A Pendragon-legenda (The Pendragon Legend). Szerb’s first novel is a wonderful romp, with a complicated plot involving a thirty-two year old Hungarian intellectual, living in England and getting caught up in a plot involving eccentric (if not mad) English, Welsh, Irish and German characters, with ghosts, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is George Seferis‘ Έξι νύχτες στην Ακρόπολη (Six Nights on the Acropolis). Seferis won the Nobel Prize for his poetry. This was his only completed novel and it is easy to see why he owed his success to his poetry rather than to his novel-writing. It imitates the French … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Ампир В (Empire V). This is the usual Pelevin post-modern satire on Russia and its ruling class but takes as its basis the idea of vampires. That the Russian ruling class (and, indeed, other ruling classes) are vampires is not, perhaps, a terribly original idea but … Read more