Translated from French by Sara HanaburghPublished by University of Virginia Press, 2014, 223 pages. Original version published in 1989. This book by Angèle Rawiri, considered the first novelist from Gabon, is about the position of women in a society that has modernized without ridding itself of traditional roles. Emilienne, a woman in a fictional African …
Month: August 2024
The Remains: Margo Glantz
Translated from Spanish by Ellen JonesPublished by Charco Press, 2023, 134 pages. Original version published in 2002. “Life is an absurd wound”(from La Última Curda by Cátulo Castillo and Aníbal Triolo) Nora García, a cellist, drives to a village in Mexico for the funeral of her ex-husband Juan, a renowned composer and pianist. As she …
Venus in Copper: Lindsey Davis
Published by Arrow Books / Random House, 1991, 318 pages. Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator who sometimes works for the Emperor Vespasian, is in jail, mostly because he has earned the enmity of the Chief Spy Anacrites. Falco had been sent to Campania by the emperor to clear up Anacrites’s mess, …
The Secret Lives of Colour: Kassia St. Clair
Published by John Murray, 2016, 328 pages. I have always loved colour, from the time my mother gave me a set of colour pencils as a child. Colours are an essential part of our world, whether it’s the blue of a cloudless sky or the brown of the earth; the yellow signage on roads, or …
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The Extinction of Irena Rey: Jennifer Croft
Published by Scribe, 2024, 309 pages. “It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. ... She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated …
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