The latest addition to my website is Emyr Humphreys‘ The Little Kingdom. Wales has not fared as well as, for example, Scotland, in recognition of its literature in recent years, despite a thriving Welsh-language publishing industry with some of its output translated into English. Humphreys is still alive at the time of writing, almost ninety-four, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Mauriac‘s Le Baiser au lépreux (A Kiss for the Leper). I first read Mauriac many, many years ago. Indeed, Le Mystère Frontenac (The Frontenac Mystery) is the first adult novel I read in French. Mauriac is a Catholic writer and it is his Catholicism that informs his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Железная Дорога (Railway), a novel from Uzbekistan. Ismailov actually lives in London and works for the BBC, having left Uzbekistan in 1992. This novel is a series of interconnected stories around the fictitious Uzbek town of Gilas and is similar in form to Fazil Iskander‘s Сандро … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Timur Vermes‘ Er ist wieder da [He’s Back]. This book has had considerable success in Germany and also caused a lot of controversy. It is based on the idea that Hitler suddenly returns to Germany in August, 2011. He does not know why but assumes that it is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thomas Brussig‘s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us). This had considerable success in Germany, as it was one of the earlier novels about the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it takes a somewhat different approach from other such novels as the narrator of the novel claims that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Insurrection, another of O’Flaherty’s novels set against the backdrop of Irish history. The history in this case is the 1916 Easter Rising, a spectacular failure from the military point of view but which had profound political repercussions later on. O’Flaherty focuses his story on a small … Read more
The latest addition to my website is yet another Latin American novel that has not been translated into English (or any other language) – Miguel Gutiérrez‘ El mundo sin Xóchitl [The World Without Xochitl]. It deals with a subject which, while not unknown to the modern novel is less common than it might be – … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Las aventuras de Barbaverde [The Adventures of Barbaverde]. Yes, I am afraid yet another novel in Spanish that has not been translated into English (and many more to come, I regret.) This is now the eighth of his works that I have read, four of which … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antoine Abel‘s Coco sec [Dry Coconut], the first novel on my website from Seychelles and, unusually for Seychelles, where English is the predominant language, it is in French (and has not been translated). Abel is apparently known as the father of Seychelles literature, and published poetry and prose … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il pianeta azzurro [The Blue Planet]. One of the joys of reading novels, particularly those from other countries, is getting different perspectives on the world. With Malerba, you certainly always get a different perspective – sometimes absurd, often fantasy, often paranoid, and always the view of … Read more