Photo: Adrian Pope Rosemary J. Brown is a journalist and author based in London. Her book, Moving Mountains: Intrepid Women Climbers and the Peaks Named in Their Honour, has just been published. Her first book was Following Nellie Bly: Her Record-Breaking Race Around the World (2021). Rosemary is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, …
Continue reading Reaching Summits: An Interview with Rosemary J. Brown
Translated from Portuguese by Helen LanePublished by Picador / Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, 663 pages. Original version published in 1984. This multigenerational story set mostly in Brazil is centred around Madruga, a Galician who leaves Spain in the early 20th century for the new world in the hope of making his fortune. When the book …
Published by Vintage, 2022, 482 pagesReview by Usha Raman and Suroor Alikhan This is the story of a friendship—one that survives betrayals and tragedies. Two 11-year-olds meet in a paediatric hospital. Sam Masur is there after a horrific accident has smashed his foot, leaving him traumatized and refusing to speak. Sadie Green is there because …
Continue reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin
Published by Zaffre, 2023, 280 pages Fiji, 1914. Sergeant Akal Singh, an Indian Sikh, has been sent to Fiji after a humiliating incident in Hong Kong, where he was serving. All he wants to do is crack an important case to prove himself, so his superiors can send him back to Hong Kong. When his …
Translated from French by Walter J. CobbPublished by Penguin, 1964 (this translation), 501 pages. Original version published in 1831. What makes a monster? Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, is physically deformed: he has a humpback, a protrusion on his chest, and only one eye because the other is covered by a wart. As …
Published by Hutchinson Heinemann / Penguin, 2024, 358 pages “The story of a war can only be fully and truly told by both the living and the dead.”—Igbo proverb Kunle is nine years old when he sends Tunde, his younger brother, out of the house, so that he can be alone with Nkechi. Tunde runs …
Originally published in four volumes. Volumes 1 and 2 translated from French by Blake Ferris and Mattias Ripa, and Volumes 3 and 4 translated by Anjali Singh.The complete volume published by Pantheon, 2007, 341 pages. The four volumes in the original version published between 2000 and 2003. English versions: Vols. 1 and 2 published as …
Published by Head of Zeus, 2022, 276 pages “You need to understand the Po to understand Italy”, wrote the poet Guido Ceronetti. So Tobias Jones sets out to explore the river, going against its current: he starts from where it flows into the Adriatic Sea, tracing it back to its source in the Alps. Compared …
Continue reading The Po—An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River: Tobias Jones
Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2021, 302 pages “I am the last nomad. … What I am really trying to say is, I am the last person in my direct line to have once lived like that, and now I feel like the sole keeper of my family’s stories.” Shugri Said Salh’s family …
Continue reading The Last Nomad—Coming of Age in the Somali Desert: Shugri Said Salh
Translated from Tamil by N. Kalyan RamanPublished by Eka (Westland Books), 2018, 173 pages. Original version published in 2017. “Once, in a village, there was a goat. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary life never leaves a trace, does it?” Near a village in Tamil Nadu, an old man …
Continue reading Poonachi, or the Story of a Black Goat: Perumal Murugan
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