“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 time of sentencing is a suite at the …
Month: March 2019
Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
Published by Hachette and Head of Zeus “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 cleft palate and club foot, …
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with an Enchanting Tawny Owl—Martin Windrow
Published by Picador, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux “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 with whom Martin Windrow shared 15 …
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese
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 Praise is a Carmelite nun from …
Judas: Amos Oz
Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange “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 the buildings still bore the marks of the war …
Talking About Books 