tmn The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il nocchiero (The Helmsman). This tells the story of a helmsman, Walter. The job consists of driving a barge from a port, nominally containing animals, though he has never seen the cargo and does not know what is really in the hold. He takes it to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is N. Scott Momaday‘s Ancient Child, another superb novel about Native American culture from Momaday. The story focuses on two quasi-outsiders. Grey is half Kiowa and half Navajo but has been brought up by her Navajo mother. She returns, aged nineteen, to her Kiowa family to assist her ageing … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Лавр (Laurus), a superb Russian novel telling the story of a fifteenth century healer, mystic and quasi-saint. Arseny, as he is initially called, though he changes his name a few times, and ends up being called Laurus, lives with his grandfather, Christofer, from the age of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abdulaziz Al-Mahmoud‘s القرصان (The Corsair), the first Qatari novel on my website. It essentially tells the story of the pirate Erhama bin Jaber, born in what is now Kuwait but brought up in Qatar. The action takes place in the early nineteenth century when the British are trying … Read more
The first part of the title is what was used in the print edition of the Guardian in this article while the second part, as you will see, is what has been used in the online version. It was prompted by the fact that World Book Night’s 2016 selection was entirely books written by whites. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jeanette Winterson‘s The Gap of Time. This is the first in a series of reimaginings of Shakespeare’s plays by well-known novelists. Winterson has chosen to do The Winter’s Tale, because, as she says, it is about an abandoned baby and she was abandoned as a baby. Winterson certainly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cyprian Ekwensi‘s Beautiful Feathers. This tells the story of Wilson Iyari, a man who runs a successful pharmacy and is head of the Nigerian-based Movement for African and Malagasy Solidarity but, as the Igbo proverb says, if he is not respected inside his own home, he is like … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Омон Ра (Omon Ra). This is a fairly conventional satire on the Soviet space programme. Omon, the hero (named after the acronym for the special police squad – his father is a police officer) dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. He and his friend Mityok, who wants … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Жёлтая стрела (The Yellow Arrow). This short novel is a train-as-a-metaphor-for-life novel, by no means the first in Russian literature. This train, called The Yellow Arrow, is a huge train. No-one knows where it comes from and only a few people seem to know that it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Lamees Naji, the third Sharp novel published this year and the third I have reviewed in the past couple of weeks. This one is different from the other two. While it is certainly experimental, on the surface it seems quite mundane. We follow the life of … Read more