Translated from Indonesian by Annie TuckerPublished by Pushkin Press, 2016, 480 pages. Original version published in 2002. “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. … She had passed away at fifty-two, rose again after being dead for twenty-one years, and from that point …
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!
A Man Called Ove: Fredrick Backman
Translated from Swedish by Henning KochPublished by Washington Square Press, 2014, 320 pages. Original version published in 2012. “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his finger a policeman’s flashlight.” When we meet him, …
A Haunted House and Other Stories: Virginia Woolf
Published by Vintage, 1944, 336 pages. I haven’t read Virginia Woolf for decades, and I had forgotten just how well she writes. I had bought this collection of her short stories in the 1980s, and it was one of the many books I had left behind in my parents’ house when I moved. It has …
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Go, Went, Gone: Jenny Erpenbeck
Translated from German by Susan BernofskyPublished by Portobello Books, 2017, 304 pages. Original version published in 2015. “War destroys everything…your family, your friends, the place where you lived, your work, your life. When you become foreign…you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, …
Best books of 2019
Photo by Abee5 (CC BY 2.0) Another year is drawing to a close, and it’s time to look back at the books we have read and pull out some of the best. Thank you for contributing to this list and making it so varied. I was delighted to see several books in translation this year. …
The Places in Between: Rory Stewart
Published by Mariner Books / Harper Perennial / Picador, 2004, 400 pages. Rory Stewart had set out to walk from Iran all the way to Nepal—through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. But in December 2000, when the Iranian government took away his visa, the Taliban refused to allow him to enter Afghanistan. So Stewart had to …
Magpie Murders: Anthony Horowitz
Published by Orion, 2016, 464 pages. This is a whodunit within a whodunit. One Friday evening, Susan Ryeland, the Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books, picks up Magpie Murders, the latest manuscript by Alan Conway—one of their most successful writers—and takes it home. She pours herself a glass of wine and starts to read. As …
The Gap of Time: Jeanette Winterson
Published by Hogarth Press, 2015, 320 pages. “God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness.” A man driven crazy by jealousy, a wife accused of adultery and a lost child: this is Jeanette Winterson’s take on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.[1] But unlike Othello, The Winter’s Tale …
Flicker: Theodore Roszak
Published by Summit Books / Chicago Review Press, 1991, 608 pages. “[E]ntertainment rules more lives than art and rules them more despotically. People don’t put up their guard when they’re being entertained. The images and the messages slip through and take hold deeper.” Flicker is a thriller, a history of film (with a conspiracy …
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesPublished by Fitzcarraldo Press / Thorndike Press, 2019, 274 pages. Original version published in 2009. “[S]ometimes I feel we’re living in a world we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with …
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Talking About Books 