Published by Picador Modern Classics, 1998, 320 pages. “We throw our parties; …we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. …There's just …
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!
Men without Women: Haruki Murakami
Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted GoosenPublished by Random House / Bond Street Books, 2017, 240 pages. Original version published in 2014. “Here's what hurts the most," Kafuku said. "I didn't truly understand her—or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she's dead and …
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated from Spanish by Lucia GravesPublished by Penguin / W&N, 2004, 486 pages. Original version published in 2001. “This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed …
Girl, Woman, Other: Bernadine Evaristo
Published by Penguin / Hamish Hamilton, 2019, 464 pages. A gay artist, an adopted child, a transgender woman, a successful lawyer, an old woman finding she has more in common with her transgender granddaughter than with her straight children…these are just some of the voices you hear in Bernadine Evaristo’s book, which in narrated in …
Black Leopard, Red Wolf: Marlon James
Published by Riverhead Books / Penguin, 2019, 640 pages. “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.” This is how the book starts. It feels like a spoiler, because the crux of the story is that a man, known only as Tracker, has been paid to look for a boy. He isn’t sure …
Podcast: Reading for our times—Reading around the world
Some years ago, a friend and fellow bookworm, Kristine Goulding, suggested on this blog that we read a book from every country in the world. And so the reading challenge was born, with only one rule: the writer has to be from the country. We've taken our time over it, but we are now up …
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Maya Angelou
Published by Ballantine Books / Virago, 1969, 320 pages. “The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.” Three strong black women …
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The Bickford Fuse: Andrey Kurkov
Translated from Russian by Boris DralyukPublished by MacLehose Press, 2017, 352 pages. This is a strange, dreamlike book. Four men are on journeys across the Soviet Union that make no sense, in a landscape where the laws of physics don’t seem to exist anymore. The journeys start sometime around the end of the Second World …
The World’s Wife: Carol Ann Duffy
Published by Faber & Faber / Picador, 1999, 96 pages. History and myth have often focused on men: Sisyphus, Lazarus, Herod, Pilate, Midas, Faust, Freud… But what of their wives? Who were they and what did they think of their men? These women are brought to life in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems. The …
The Heart’s Invisible Furies: John Boyne
Published by Penguin / Thorndike Press, 2017, 961 pages. The book begins in Ireland in the 1940s: The Catholic Church is all-powerful, and anything outside the norm is not only frowned upon but punished. For example, having a child outside marriage, as Catherine Goggin, a pregnant teenager in an Irish village finds out. She …
Talking About Books 