tmn The latest addition to my website is Rupert Thomson‘s Katherine Carlyle. Thomson’s novels tend to be dark and are often concerned with people trying to escape. This one is no exception. The eponymous heroine is nineteen years old. She lives with her father in Rome though he is usually absent, as he is a war … Read more
The Saltire Society has announced its shortlist for its 2015 literary awards. While the fiction list has several of the usual suspects – Irvine Welsh, Kate Atkinson, the underrated Janice Galloway, whose novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing I read many years ago and plan to reread and review some day, Andrew O’Hagan amd … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Leila S Chudori‘s Pulang (Home). The novel tells the story of a group of Indonesians who are abroad in 1965, during the 1965 anti-communist coup and are unable to return and have to spend the rest of their lives abroad. The main character is Dimas Suryo, who is … Read more
I have just returned from two weeks in Central Asia, which was highly enjoyable and a lifelong dream but, from the literary point of view relatively disappointing. I found only three bookshops, the last two on the last day. The first was, somewhat surprisingly, in the middle of Khiva. (Khiva is essentially a preserved small … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Exploradores del abismo [Explorers of the Abyss]. This book is not a novel but, rather, a collection of linked short stories, about what Vila-Matas calls exploring the abyss, though his ideas of what is exploring the abyss may not be shared by everyone. Only one of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Orhan Pamuk‘s Kafamda bir tuhaflik (A Strangeness in My Mind). This is Pamuk’s labour of love, a hymn to his city (Istanbul), particularly as seen by the ordinary people. The main character is Mevlut Karataş, a yoghurt and boza seller, though he has many other professions – a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jorge Eduardo Eielson‘s El cuerpo de Giulia-no [The Body of Julia-n]. Eielson was best known as an artist and poet and this clearly shows in this book. Though there is a sort of a plot – how the narrator grew up on a farm, did not like it, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paul Atanya‘s Bloodshed in Mana, the first novel from South Sudan on my website. The novel follows a traditional African theme, that of the coming of the white man to violently replace an idyllic African culture, though with a slight twist. The culture is that of the Mana … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cyprian Ekwensi‘s Jagua Nana. This is an early example of the Nigerian urban novel – previous novels had been mainly set in the rural areas – and is set mainly in Lagos, though also, in part in Port Harcourt, Onitsha and Bagana. Jagua Nana – Jagua comes from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Dublinesca (Dublinesque). It is about a retired publisher, Samuel Riba, a former alcoholic, the alcoholism being one of the reasons for his retirement, who prided himself on publishing quality contemporary fiction in Spanish, with a fiction list which seems to match the taste of Vila-Matas. He … Read more