Published by Amaryllis, 2017, 132 pages. The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house …
Continue reading The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
Published by Zubaan, 2005, 316 pages. This is the story of Pema Tsomo, who grows up in a village in Bhutan. When she is born, the astrologer tells her mother that the child will be restless, always wanting to travel. But, her mother thinks, where can a girl go? Women didn’t leave their homes; they …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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), …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading Dissipatio H.G.—The Vanishing: Guido Morselli
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 …
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, …
