tmn The latest addition to my website is Rosemary Tonks‘s The Bloater. This is a quirky comedy of manners. The heroine/narrator is Min who is married to George, with whom she hardly seems to have any contact. She is pursued by a much older man whom she prefers to keep as a friend and, during the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Guillaume Lecasble‘s Lobster (Lobster). We follow the story of a lobster who, along with his parents, is caught and placed in an aquarium in a restaurant. His parents are cooked but just as he is placed in the pot, there is a huge bang and the pot is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miki Liukkonen‘s O [O]. Liukkonen, who died in June 2023 aged thirty three, has written a monumental novel (novel)858 pages) in the Finnish original and 961 in the French translation which I read), set in Helsinki in 2013 about a cast of over a hundred characters all of … Read more
You do not need me to tell you that the economics of publishing literary fiction are difficult but, I hope you do not need me to tell that there are a whole slew of publishers in the UK and US, but also elsewhere, publishing superb works of fiction, usually on a shoestring. A couple of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Langley‘s Arkady. This is a dystopian novel in a country that is much like Britain. Indeed, it was published five years ago and is looking more prescient today. Two young boys – Jackson and Frank – are on holiday in Spain with their parents. Their mother disappears … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Perišić‘s Hodati kao mačka (A Cat at the End of the World). The book opens around 400 BCE. Katia is a slave in Syracuse (Sicily but then a Creek colony ruled by a tyrant). The son of his owner, Pigras, is given a cat, Miu, a rare … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eva Švankmajerová‘s Jeskyně Baradla (Baradla Cave). This novel was first published in samizdat in 1981 and was only published in book form in 1995, after the fall of communism. It is a surrealist novel by a woman known more as poet and artist than novelist but it works … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Coover‘s Open House. There is a party going on in the penthouse suite in a Manhattan high-rise but nobody know who is giving it, who owns the suite and what the party is for. There are free drinks and food and people just seem to drift in, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 燃えつきた地図 (The Ruined Map). On the face if it this is the story of a detective looking for a missing person. Our unnamed detective is working for a woman whose husband – a reliable, conventional man, who had just received a promotion at work – disappeared … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fausta Cialente‘s Ballata Levantina (The Levantines). This novel tells the story of well-to-do European expatriates (primarily but certainly not exclusively Italian) living in Egypt (primarily Alexandria) from the 1920s to the end of World War II. Our heroine is Daniela. Her grandmother, Francesca, had been a successful dancer … Read more