Translated from French by Robin BussPublished by Penguin, 1996, 1276 pages. Original version serialized in 1844-46 and published as a book in 1846. First unabridged translation by Emma Hardy, 1846. France, 1815. Napoleon is in exile, but has escaped from Elba. The Bourbons are on the throne. France is divided between the Bonapartists, who secretly …
Category: Fiction
The Peacock and the Sparrow: I.S. Berry
Published by No Exit Press / Atria Books, 2023, 338 pages. Shane Collins is a CIA spy, posted in Manama, Bahrain. He is coming to the end of his career and merely wants to see his final posting out. But that is not what happens. He is running an informant—Rashid, who is part of Fourteen …
Such a Good Family: Caitlin Weaver
Published by Storm Publishing, 2024, 352 pages. Two perfect suburban families: Lorrie and Ed, and their children Knox, Archie and Chloé; and Eden and Witt, and their daughter Summer. Summer and Knox, both seniors in high school, are dating. Lorrie and Eden—who are very close friends—joke about the children getting married and becoming each other’s …
Snow Country: Yasunari Kawabata
Translated from Japanese by Edward G. SeidenstickerPublished by Penguin, 1956, 121 pages. Original version published in 1948. Shimamura takes a train to a town in the mountains of Japan. It is cold, and there is heavy snow. Shimamura, a wealthy married man from Tokyo, is travelling to the town to see a geisha called Komako. …
The Lost Child: Caryl Phillips
Published by Vintage, 2015, 260 pages. Lost children: children without an anchor to steady them, to keep them safe. The main characters in this book are adrift and just about manage to survive. It is the 1950s. The book centres around Monica, a young English woman, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She gives up her …
Playground: Richard Powers
Published by Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024, 381 pages. The ocean: a vast expanse that covers nearly 71 per cent of the earth. The deep sea still holds many mysteries and as we are discovering them, we are also destroying this habitat. Playground follows four people whose lives are intertwined with the ocean: Todd Keane, a tech …
The Hacienda: Isabel Cañas
Published by Solaris, 2023, 345 pages. Beatriz marries Rodolfo Solórzano, a wealthy landowner, to escape her circumstances as a poor relative who is treated by her aunt as a servant. But when she arrives at the Hacienda San Isidro, the home that is to be her domain, it is not at all as she had …
Against the Loveless World: Susan Abulhawa
Published by Bloomsbury, 2020, 366 pages. “This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.” “I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.” Nahr, a Palestinian woman, sits in …
The Dark Side of Skin: Jeferson Tenório
Translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas LobatoPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 202 pages. Original version published in 2020. “Sometimes you’d have a thought and go to live inside it. Push everyone away. Build a house that way. Somewhere far. Deep inside yourself. That was how you dealt with things. These days, I choose to think …
Murder in the Pettah: Jeanne Cambrai
Published by Penguin, 2001, 483 pages. The body of a young English woman is found in the Pettah—a disreputable part of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Not a place where you would wander around at night. So what was the young woman, Dorothy Bell, doing in the Pettah? Who killed her? Dorothy’s father, Reginald Bell, a wealthy …
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