The latest addition to my website is Han Kang‘s 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian). This book won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. It is a disturbing but superbly written novel. Yeong-hye, a Korean woman, married to Mr. Cheong, is seemingly a good and conventional wife. Suddenly, as the result of an unpleasant dream (she will have … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il doppio regno (The Dual Realm). This is another strange novel from Capriolo. It is a diary written by an Italian woman aged around thirty who does not remember her name and has something of a hazy recollection of the events that led to this situation. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Espido Freire‘s Irlanda (Irlanda). Freire’s first novel is the only one of her novels to be translated into English. It tells the story of Natalia, a teenage girl whose sister, Sagrario, dies at the the beginning of the novel, after a long illness. She is invited to spend … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s The Well Dressed Explorer. The eponymous well-dressed explorer is George Brewster who, when a young teenager falls in love with Nita. Nita is happy to play along but also wants to enjoy herself and not just with George. He hovers around her, returning even when his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jenny Erpenbeck‘s Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days). This is a non-whimsical variation on a technique we have seen in Kate Atkinson‘s Life After Life. In this case, the heroine, who is only named at the end and then only with her married name, Frau Hoffmann, dies … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s A Kindness Cup. Astley deals directly with violence in this novel. The story tells of a group of white vigilantes in the early part of the last century who set out to teach a band of aborigines a lesson (nominally for stealing a baby, which they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s The Acolyte. This novel is now out of print in the UK and US, which is a shame, as it is an excellent novel about both an artist who is thoroughly self-centred and a man who has no sense of purpose and worth, who becomes the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Redonnet‘s La femme au Colt 45 [The Woman with the Colt 45]. Redonnet seemed to have stopped publishing but she has now appeared with a new novel and a new publisher. This novel is even grimmer than some of her previous works. It is set in two … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Risa Wataya‘s 勝手にふるえてろ [Tremble All You Want]. This is the first-person story of the twenty-six year old Yoshika Etô, virgin, loner, and deeply in love with a young man she knew in high school but whom she has not seen for several years. Kirishima Ni, one of her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kaori Ekuni‘s きらきらひかる (Twinkle Twinkle). This is another quirky novel about a quirky relationship. In this case Shoko, an emotionally unstable woman, who is a borderline alcoholic, is married to Mutsuki, a homosexual. Both are aware of the other’s situation. However, Shoko had been advised to get married … Read more