Published by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2014, 448 pages. “If you shut up truth and bury it in the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.” Emile Zola Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. …
Continue reading Hack Attack—How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch: Nick Davies
Translated from Thai by Mui PoopoksakulPublished by Tilted Axis Press, 2017, 192 pages. Original version published in 2000. A man is intrigued by the spaces between the words a schoolgirl is writing in her diary, a couple discover a corpse on the roof crushed under the fallen letters from a neon sign, a group of …
Published by Picador / Penguin, 1992, 448 pages. “The door opened. A dozen cramped smells blew in their faces: lilac water, rot, things they didn’t recognize. Sam found a switch and a long, wide hallway suddenly jumped at them.” Meet the central character in this book—the old house at 1, Cloud Street, in Perth. The …
Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Europa Editions, 2016, 386 pages. Original version published in 2014. How much do you need to know about the writer to be able to enjoy their books? Nothing at all, according to Elena Ferrante, author of the Nepolitan Quartet and other books. She writes under a pseudonym and …
Continue reading Frantumaglia—A Writer’s Journey: Elena Ferrante
Published by Penguin India / The Borough Press, 2002, 560 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian "The Glass Palace” is, for me, a beautiful title for a novel. I love the image it creates of fragility, beauty, brilliance, and utter vulnerability. For years I have reached for Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, and until a few days …
One of the things this blog tries to do is to highlight books from outside the usual UK-US cannon. We live in a rich, varied world, and as readers, we are ideally placed to explore this richness through books. This is what lay behind the reading challenge that some of us set ourselves. From time …
Published by Many Rivers Press, 1996, 98 pages. “At the centre of this lifethere is a man I want to know again.” Do we lose something of ourselves as we scurry through life, running to make the next deadline and dealing with the mundane business of day-to-day life? David Whyte’s poems are a reminder of …
Published by Rider / Parallax Press, 1987, 308 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian In Thich Nhat Hahn’s Old Path White Clouds, subtitled The life story of the Buddha, the first 80 chapters give us an account of the Buddha’s life and work until his death at the age of 80. The 81stchapter (the last) shows the …
Continue reading Old Path White Clouds: The life story of the Buddha—Thich Nhat Hahn
Published by University of Hawaii Press, 1994, 93 pages. If this book were to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “‘Development’ comes to a small Pacific island”. Tales of the Tikongs is a collection of vignettes of what happens when foreign development experts try to impose development on a happy-go-lucky people. And …
Translated from French by Julian EvansPublished by Gallic Books, 2015, 160 pages. Original version published in 2015. On 20 October 2011, the news was full of the capture of the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, found hiding in a culvert in near Sirte. It was an unimaginable fall for the man who saw himself as the …
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