Published by Hutchinson / Harvill, 2017, 512 pages. “If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.” In 1922, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by the Bolsheviks for being an aristocrat. The Count’s home at the …
Month: March 2019
Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
Published by Hachette / Head of Zeus / Apollo, 2017, 560 pages. “History has failed us, but no matter.” Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan, a group of immigrants about whom not a lot has been written in fiction. The book starts in a little fishing village in Korea. Hoonie, a man with a …
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with an Enchanting Tawny Owl—Martin Windrow
Published by Picador / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Bantam Press, 2014, 320 pages. “Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.” Especially when the owl sees it as a game, pecking at the razor at the end of each stroke and trying to eat the shaving cream. Meet Mumble, the Tawny Owl …
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese
Published by Vintage, 2009, 560 pages. This is a rich story, interweaving the lives of people working at a clinic in Addis Ababa run by a Christian mission (known as the Missing Clinic by the local people and everyone else) with the history of Ethiopia from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Sister Mary Joseph …
Judas: Amos Oz
Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de LangePublished by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2016, 288 pages. “Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of …
Talking About Books 