Published by Profile Books, 2011, 384 pages.Review by Rishad Patell A difficult book to review. On one hand, John Gimlette’s book on the northern coast of South America provides a great deal of insight into the countries of Guyana and Suriname and the French department of French Guiana. Often ignored in travel writing and rarely …
Continue reading Wild Coast—Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge: John Gimlette
Photo: Joanna Szymkiewicz Doreen Cunningham is an Irish-British writer, who was born in Wales. She is the author of Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales, which won the 2020 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction; and was shortlisted for The Pat Kavanagh Award and the 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay …
Continue reading Travelling with Whales: An Interview with Doreen Cunningham
Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Translated from Czech by Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova and George TheinerPublished by Faber & Faber / W. W. Norton & Company, 1973, 288 pages. Original version published in 1966. Meet Lieutenant Boruvka of the Czechoslovak police: a rotund man with baby blue eyes, a tuft of hair on top of his head, and a mournful …
Continue reading The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka: Josef Skvorecky
Translated from Spanish by Jethro SoutarPublished by And Other Stories, 2014, 275 pages. Original version published in 2008. “[F]or our island was all alone at sea and there was no other land we could join forces with to combat our lack of everything. It was around then that I realised we islanders had no one …
Continue reading By Night the Mountain Burns: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
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