Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger and Yardenne GreenspanPublished by Riverhead Books, 2019, 209 pages. Original version published in 2018. A child encourages a man to jump off the top of a building, believing that the man is a superhero and will fly. A man keeps the compacted wreck …
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!
Inspired by Mexico: An Interview with Kat de Moor
Photo: Lucía Brándulas Kat de Moor is a writer, who has just published her first two books, Anatomía de una entrega (translated into English by Robin Myers as Chronicle of a Longing) and Querido Miércoles (translated by Robin Myers as Dear Wednesday). Kat was born in Belgium where she studied translation and interpretation. Fluent in …
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Feminine Ingenuity—How Women Inventors Changed America: Anne L. Macdonald
Published by Ballantine Books, 1992, 415 pages. “Although women have invented since the beginning of time, it seems as if full recognition of their role has been painfully slow.” When you think of inventors, who do you think of? Usually it is men like Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Giovanni Marconi. Seeing that women …
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The New Wilderness: Diane Cook
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2020, 416 pages. This book is set in a dystopian future in the United States at a time when all the natural resources have been used up by humans. Cities are polluted, the air is almost unbreathable, and children are dying as a result. One of these sick children is Beatrice’s …
The Desert and the Drum: Mbarek Ould Beyrouk
Translated from French by Rachel McGillPublished by Dedalus, 2018, 170 pages. Original version published in 2015. “There was no moon, no stars. The light has been drained away, the sky left mute. I could distinguish neither colours nor shapes. Dunes and trees had been engulfed by the universe, sucked into its sidereal blackness. … I …
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The Bone Readers: Jacob Ross
Published by Little, Brown and Company / Peepal Tree Press / Sphere, 2016, 264 pages. This is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit from a Grenadian writer. Michael Digson (“Digger”) is out of work, living on the island of Camaho.[1] He is the illegitimate son (“outside child”) of a maid and her employer, the Commissioner of Police. …
Real Life: Brandon Taylor
Published by Daunt Books, 2020, 336 pages. “It was a cool evening in late summer, when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.” Wallace is a young, gay, Black man who is four years into a degree in biochemistry at a predominantly white …
The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
Published by Amaryllis, 2017, 132 pages. The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house …
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The Powerful and the Damned—Private Diaries in Turbulent Times: Lionel Barber
Published by WH Allen, 2020, 480 pages. From 2005 to 2020, Lionel Barber had what he called “the best job in the world”: editor of the London Financial Times. This is Barber’s account of those years and his close encounters with the great and the not-so-great (or good!). As editor of a major newspaper, Barber …
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The Circle of Karma: Kunzang Choden
Published by Zubaan, 2005, 316 pages. This is the story of Pema Tsomo, who grows up in a village in Bhutan. When she is born, the astrologer tells her mother that the child will be restless, always wanting to travel. But, her mother thinks, where can a girl go? Women didn’t leave their homes; they …
Talking About Books 