Published by Pan / Mulholland Books / Mantle, 2018, 880 pages. I wasn’t going to write this, since I’ve already reviewed a book in the Shardlake series (Dark Fire). But Tombland is a little different—it is not just a murder mystery but also describes a little-known event in English history. The series centres around Matthew …
Category: Fiction
The Book of Dust, Book 1: La Belle Sauvage—Philip Pullman
Published by Penguin Random House, 2017, 560 pages. A mysterious substance called Dust; the alethiometer, an instrument that can reveal the truth; and daemons, animal-shaped manifestations of people’s inner selves: we are in familiar territory, the world of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. Almost 20 years after the last book in the trilogy was …
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The Red-Haired Woman: Orhan Pamuk
Translated from Turkish by Ekin OklapPublished by Faber & Faber, 2017, 272 pages. Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel is about obsession, guilt and the destructive relations between fathers and sons. The novel is narrated by Cem, looking back on himself as a 16-year-old boy. His father, a pharmacist and a communist, is often absent—he is either …
The History of Bees: Maja Lunde
Translated from Norwegian by Diane OatleyPublished by Scrivener UK / Simon & Schuster, 2017, 352 pages. Original version published in 2015. We are in the midst of the sixth extinction and are losing species at an alarming rate. But we seem to have trouble recognizing the scale of the loss. How many of us associate …
Cinnamon: Samar Yazbek
Translated from Arabic by Emily DanbyPublished by Arabia Books, 2013, 124 pages. Original version published in 2008. A woman in Damascus wakes in the night, sees a triangle of light where a door is left ajar and walks in. She finds her maid in bed with her husband. She throws the maid out, and immediately …
Les Misérables: Victor Hugo
Translated from French by Norman DennyPublished by Penguin, 1976 (this translation), 1232 pages. Original version first published in 1862. This is probably one of Victor Hugo’s best-known books, popularized by the musical starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway. But since a two-hour film can only provide a brief summary, I decided to read …
Washington Black: Esi Edugyan
Published by Serpent's Tail, 2018, 448 pages. Although this book starts on a Barbados plantation in 1830, it is not really about slavery but follows a young slave, Washington Black, over six years, starting with his life on the Faith plantation. As the book begins, Washington is 11 years old, and the owner of the …
There There: Tommy Orange
Published by Harvill Secker / Vintage, 2018, 304 pages. Native Americans, or Indians, were the first settlers in North America. But when colonizers from Europe came, they not only took away the Native Americans' lands and livelihoods but rewrote their narratives. There There is Tommy Orange’s way of reclaiming the narrative of the Native Americans …
A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towles
Published by Hutchinson / Harvill, 2017, 512 pages. “If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.” In 1922, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by the Bolsheviks for being an aristocrat. The Count’s home at the …
Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
Published by Hachette / Head of Zeus / Apollo, 2017, 560 pages. “History has failed us, but no matter.” Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan, a group of immigrants about whom not a lot has been written in fiction. The book starts in a little fishing village in Korea. Hoonie, a man with a …
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