Published by Faber & Faber, 2021, 116 pages. 1985. It is almost Christmas in New Ross, a small town in Ireland. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, is making his deliveries before the holidays. The bitter cold means that he has a lot of orders to fill. Furlong is the son of an unmarried …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
Travels in Lika: An Interview with Mary Novakovich
Mary Novakovich is a UK-based journalist and travel writer. Photo: Adam Batterbee Her book, My Family and Other Enemies: Life and Travels in Croatia’s Hinterland (2022), won the 2023 British Guild of Travel Writers Adele Evans Award for best travel narrative book, and was also shortlisted for the 2023 Stanford Travel Book of the Year. …
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Dear Wednesday: Kat De Moor
Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers2024, 202 pages. Original version published by Grupo Editorial Círculo Rojo SL, 2021, 218 pages. Natalia Missidenti is on the train back to Geneva. Reaching for her umbrella, which has slipped to the back of the luggage rack, she finds a box. She looks around: it does not seem to …
A Sky the Color of Chaos: M.J. Fièvre
Published by Beating Windward Press, 2014, 178 pages. “My life was a deconstructed text, and I was surrounded by words—their sustaining luxuries and dangers. Words have power; you never know what may come of them. Take this: I want to leave—the rest is a jigsaw of memory taking up space in my head. I want …
Homegoing: Yaa Gyasi
Published by Penguin, 2016, 305 pages. Effia and Esi, two Asante women, born in Ghana—then known as the Gold Coast—are half-sisters but unaware of each other’s existence. They go on to lead very different lives, and the paths they take affect the generations that follow. The book begins in the late 18th century. The British …
Les années: Annie Ernaux
Published by folio, 2008, 254 pages. Published in English as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017. Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer. “All the images will disappear. ...“—all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to …
Nature Cure: Richard Mabey
Published by Vintage, 2005, 228 pages. “My past, or lack of it, had caught up with me. I’d been bogged down in the same place for too long, trapped by habits and memories. I was clotted with rootedness. And in the end I’d fallen ill and run out of words. My Irish grandfather, a day-worker …
Reflecting Argentinian Society: An Interview with Claudia Piñeiro
(Note: This interview was originally conducted in Spanish and translated by Leslie Jones.Lea aquí la versión en español.) Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentinian author and scriptwriter. One of her best-known books is Las Viudas de los Jueves (2005, published in English as Thursday Night Widows, 2009), which was made into a film in 2009 and …
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A Book of Days: Patti Smith
Published by Bloomsbury, 2022, 386 pages. This is a book that keeps giving. The multi-talented Patti Smith—singer, songwriter, photographer, author, painter—has put together a collection of photographs (most of them taken by Smith with her 250 Land Camera), one for each day of the year. This book came from her Instagram account, which she started …
Cloud Cuckoo Land: Anthony Doerr
Published by 4th Estate, 2021, 577 pages. “Maybe in the old days men did walk the earth as beasts, and a city of birds floated in the heavens between the realms of men and gods. Or maybe, like all lunatics, the shepherd made his own truth, and so for him, true it was.” “‘I know …
Talking About Books 