The latest addition to my website is Paola Capriolo‘s Il nocchiero (The Helmsman). This tells the story of a helmsman, Walter. The job consists of driving a barge from a port, nominally containing animals, though he has never seen the cargo and does not know what is really in the hold. He takes it to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jeanette Winterson‘s The Gap of Time. This is the first in a series of reimaginings of Shakespeare’s plays by well-known novelists. Winterson has chosen to do The Winter’s Tale, because, as she says, it is about an abandoned baby and she was abandoned as a baby. Winterson certainly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lesia Daria‘s Forty One. This is a novel by a woman born in the USA, of Ukrainian parents but currently living in the UK. Her heroine, Eva Holden, is, however, Polish, albeit with Ukrainian grandparents and living in the UK. Eva is an intelligent and educated woman but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums). This is a remorselessly grim story of life in Ceausescu’s Romania, told by an unnamed female narrator. At the beginning of the book, she is sharing a room at college with five other young women, including Lola. Much of what … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel). This tells the story of Leopold Auberg, a seventeen year old German-Romanian. When the Soviets capture Romania at the end of World War II, all those of German origin aged between seventeen and forty-five are rounded up and sent to a labour … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kathryn Davis‘ Duplex. This novel takes a fairly conventional story – a street somewhere in the US, with a boy and girl growing up together and destined to be married but somehow not quite working it out. However, to really confuse us, Davis has thrown in both strong … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kathryn Davis‘ The Thin Place, a brilliant but understated novel about spirituality, the forces of nature and the role they play in our lives and the often arbitrariness of life, but all firmly rooted in the real world. The real world, in this case, is a small New … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jenny Erpenbeck‘s Gehen, ging, gegangen [Go, Went, Gone]. This is a very timely book, as it is about the refugee crisis and is, indeed, the second book about refugees I have read recently. The other one showed that Europe (or, at least, France) was more welcoming but then … 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