The latest addition to my website isYuri Herrera‘s La estación del pantano (Season of the Swamp). Future Mexican president Benito Juárez was exiled by president Antonio López de Santa Anna. Juárez and his companions end up in New Orleans. It is 1853. We know tthey were there for eighteen months but we know nothing of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Stephen Paul Foster‘s Fatal Friendship. This is a postmodern, philosophical novel. Involving two well-to-do, very intellectual friends, based in St Louis. Nearly all the characters (or, perhaps all, as there may well be some I did not spot) are named after someone else,mainly philosophers (many of which I … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alison Langley‘s Budapest Noir Ilona Gets a Phone. Ilona is a sixty-one year old Hungarian woman. Communism has fallen and she is finally allowed a phone, previously denied as her husband had been killed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Her son, Emil, had defected to the USA … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sahar Mustafah‘s The Beauty of Your Face. This novel is set primarily in the Chicago suburbs. However the heroine, Afaf Rahman, like the author, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. We follow two alternating stories . The first is Afaf’s story. Her parents did not get on and … 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 Cormac McCarthy‘s Stella Maris. As he is ninety, this may well be his last novel and he definitely goes out with a grim tale. The main character in this book – Alicia Western – had appeared in The Passenger, McCarthy’s previous book, published earlier this year. This novel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cormac McCarthy‘s The Passenger. Published when he was eighty-nine, it is clear that McCarthy can still write a first-class novel. Our hero is Bobby Western. Two things initially cause him misery – the suicide of his twin sister, whom he was in love with and the fact that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is A. M. Homes‘ The Unfolding. Homes tells two linked stories relating to the Hitchens family. The family is the Big Guy (we never learn his real first name), a very successful and rich businessman, his wife Charlotte, an alcoholic who feels her whole life has just been as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Franzen‘s Crossroads. This is another huge book from Franzen telling the story of a dysfunctional family (church minister father, mother, three sons and one daughter) set in New Prospect, Illinois, in the early 1970s. None of the characters can be said to be evil but all bar … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Susan Daitch‘s Siege of Comedians. This is a superb and highly complex novel with three main characters and lots of secondary ones. We follow Iridia, a forensic sculptor for the Brooklyn Missing Persons Bureau, who uncovers a people trafficking plot but has to flee to Vienna as the … Read more