Published by Picador / Penguin, 1992, 448 pages. “The door opened. A dozen cramped smells blew in their faces: lilac water, rot, things they didn’t recognize. Sam found a switch and a long, wide hallway suddenly jumped at them.” Meet the central character in this book—the old house at 1, Cloud Street, in Perth. The …
Month: November 2017
Frantumaglia—A Writer’s Journey: Elena Ferrante
Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Europa Editions, 2016, 386 pages. Original version published in 2014. How much do you need to know about the writer to be able to enjoy their books? Nothing at all, according to Elena Ferrante, author of the Nepolitan Quartet and other books. She writes under a pseudonym and …
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The Glass Palace: Amitav Ghosh
Published by Penguin India / The Borough Press, 2002, 560 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian "The Glass Palace” is, for me, a beautiful title for a novel. I love the image it creates of fragility, beauty, brilliance, and utter vulnerability. For years I have reached for Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, and until a few days …
West African Books with Unconventional Approaches to Gender and Power (from Electric Lit)
One of the things this blog tries to do is to highlight books from outside the usual UK-US cannon. We live in a rich, varied world, and as readers, we are ideally placed to explore this richness through books. This is what lay behind the reading challenge that some of us set ourselves. From time …
Talking About Books 