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 …
Category: Fiction
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 …
Celestial Bodies: Jokha Alharthi
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn BoothPublished by Sandstone Press, 2018, 256 pages. Original version published in 2010. Celestial Bodies is a novel by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi that won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. This makes it unusual—there aren’t a lot of books by Omani writers translated into English, and this is the …
Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Published by Ace Books / Gollancz / Corgi, 1990, 368 pages. This delightfully subversive look at the Apocalypse and everything that went before is one of my favourite books. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, have been living on Earth since the beginning. Crowley, who starts out as the serpent in the Garden of …
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The Quarry: Iain Banks
Published by Little, Brown / Abacus, 2013, 336 pages. “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”Dylan Thomas Guy is dying and has no intention of going gentle into the good night. He summons his best friends to his crumbling house by the quarry by telling …
Mister Pip: Lloyd Jones
Published by John Murray / Hodder & Stoughton / Dial Press / Knopf Canada, 2007, 272 pages. Set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of a young girl, Matilda, who is 13 when we first meet her. The story takes places mostly in the 1990s, during the …
The Memory Police: Yoko Ogawa
Translated from Japanese by Stephen SnyderPublished by Vintage, 2019, 288 pages. Original version published in 1994. “‘Things go on disappearing, one by one. … It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. … People gather in little groups …
No Place to Call Home—Love, Loss, Belonging: J.J. Bola
Published by OWN IT!, 2017, 336 pages. “And in the end, we are all looking for the same place: somewhere to call home. Home is somewhere we know, somewhere we trust. … Home is where your heart is, home is where you rest your head, home is where you never feel alone. For me, there …
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Beyond the Rice Fields: Naivo
Translated from French by Allison M. CharrettePublished by Restless Books, 2017, 500 pages. Original version published in 2016. This is the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English. It tells the story of Rafa, a young woman, and Tsito, the boy her father buys her for a slave. Their relationship is closer than …
The Ruins of Time: Ben Woolfenden
Published by Corgi / Black Swan, 1992, 256 pages. “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” This quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero sets …
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