Real people have been the basis for literary characters for almost as long as there have been novels. Someone has even written a book on it. More recently, we have seen more and more novelists use actual real people in their novels. Some people don’t like that. Jonathan Dee commented there is something fundamentally compromised … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Taiye Selasi‘s
The latest addition to my website is Joanna Scott‘s The Closest Possible Union. The novel is set almost entirely on a slave ship and tells the story of Tom Beauchamp, a fourteen-year old boy, son of the owner of the ship (though this is known only to the captain and first mate), his fears and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ned Beauman‘s The Teleportation Accident. It’s not a science fiction novel, more a pastiche of science fiction, US noir, particularly 1930s noir, conspiracy theories and spy fiction. It’s quirky, it’s funny, at times it is stupid but is a thoroughly enjoyable read and certainly different from your run-of-the-mill … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tahmima Anam‘s The Good Muslim. It tells the story of a feminist doctor in Bangladesh during the period immediately after independence in 1971 as well as in the mid-1980s. Maya’s brother, with whom she had been very close, has returned from the war a very changed man and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Naomi Alderman‘s The Lessons. Naomi Alderman is one of the Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Though this novel, an Oxford University and after novel, owes a certain amount to Brideshead Revisited, The Line of Beauty and The Secret History, it is still a good, well-written novel, telling the … Read more
On Monday and Tuesday, Sotheby’s in London held an auction for English PEN of books by well-known authors, with annotations by the authors. The organiser of the auction, book dealer Rick Gekoski, describes what many of them did. I did think of attending the auction myself but realised the prices would be way out of … Read more
Though we are only just over twelve years into the 21st century (yes, I can do the maths; the 21st century started on 1 January 2001), ABC has produced its list of the ten best Spanish novels of the 21st century. However, the first one on the list was actually published in the 20th century … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Mauriac‘s Le Mystère Frontenac (UK: The Frontenac Mystery; US: The Frontenacs). Unlike some of his other novels, where the family is seen as insidious and threatening, in this novel the family comes across as much more friendly, even if, at times, some of the individuals feel forced … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mohamed Toihiri‘s La République des Imberbes [The Republic of the Beardless], the first novel from the Comoros on my website. The Comoros have had a tumultuous history since independence from France in 1975 and this novel gives a barely fictionalised account of a specific period when the ruthless … Read more