Illustrated by Benedetta C. VialliPublished by Ebb Tide Press, 2020, 26 pages. It feels like so many people all over the world have become polarized, divided into opposing factions who do not talk to or listen to each other. The recent lockdown has not helped; it has only exacerbated isolation and forced us into our …
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!
The Assassin’s Song: M.G. Vassanji
Published by Vintage Books, 2007, 339 pages. “I often wished my distinction would simply go away, that I would wake up one morning and it wouldn’t be there. I did not want to be God, or His trustee, or His avatar—the distinctions often blurred in the realm of the mystical that was my inheritance. Growing …
Dunbar: Edward St Aubyn
Published by Hogarth Press, 2017, 256 pages. Dunbar, a retelling of King Lear, is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series.[1] Edward St Aubyn sets the story in the present with the King Lear character as a media mogul, Dunbar (shades of Rupert Murdoch?). Dunbar is in an old people’s home, where he has been put …
The Capital: Robert Menasse
Translated from German by Jamie BullochPublished by MacLehose Press, 2019, 411 pages. Original version published in 2017. The European Commission seems an unlikely setting for a novel. But by foregrounding the people who work for the EC, with their individual quirks, worries and talents, Robert Menasse brings the institution to life. Fenia Xenopolou (aka Xeno), …
The Testaments: Margaret Atwood
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2019, 432 pages. “All things come to she who waits. Time wounds all heels. Patience is a virtue. Vengeance is mine.” Margaret Atwood says that the question she was asked most often about The Handmaid’s Tale was what happened next? How did Gilead fall? The Testaments, written 35 years after …
Dissipatio H.G.—The Vanishing: Guido Morselli
Translated from Italian by Frederika RandallPublished by The New York Review of Books, Inc., 2020, 168 pages. Original version published in 2012. What would happen to the planet if the entire human race was to disappear? In this novella, Guido Morselli imagines a world empty of people. The book is narrated by the one man …
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This Mournable Body: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Published by Faber & Faber, 2020, 384 pages. What happens when dreams, and the confidence of youth, disappear? What happens when life turns out to be less than what we expected? And worst of all, what happens when we disappoint ourselves? This is what Tambudzai, the protagonist of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, finds herself …
Rosy is My Relative: Gerald Durrell
Published by The Chaucer Press / Fontana Press / Viking Adult, 1968, 240 pages. Adrian Rookwhistle has led an uneventful life. The son of a vicar, he lost both parents when he was 20. When we meet him, he is 30, working in London as a clerk in the firm of Bindweed, Cornelius and Chunter, …
Of Water and the Spirit—Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman: Malidoma Patrice Somé
Published by Penguin, 1994, 311 pages. “The story I am going to tell comes from a place deep inside of myself, a place that perceives all that I have irremediably lost and, perhaps, what gain there is behind the loss. If people forget their past as a way to survive, other people remember it for …
The Devil and the Dark Water: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books, 2020, 576 pages. 1634. A ship, the Saardam, is about to set sail from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam. The ship is carrying a secret cargo that only very few know about. On board are the ambitious Governor General of Batavia, Jan Haan; his wife Sara Wessel and …
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