Published by Vertigo, 1995, 288 pages. Written in the 1980s, this graphic novel is set in another one of Alan Moore’s dystopian alternative futures. It’s the late 1990s in Britain. A war and a near-miss nuclear conflict has led to the takeover by a fascist government, with Adam Susan at its head. The government is …
Continue reading V for Vendetta: written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd
1989, 454 pages. Widely regarded to be the best Norwegian book ever written, and recipient of numerous literary awards, it is strange that Mengele Zoo has yet to be published in English. It is the first in a trilogy that continues with Himmelblomsttreets muligheter (The Sky Flower Tree’s Opportunities, 1995) and Afrodites basseng (Aphrodite’s Pool, …
Translated from Spanish by Nick CaistorPublished by Black Swan / Dutton, 2008, 611 pages. Original version published in 2006. The first chapter of this book felt like a piece of music—flutes gently celebrating the wedding of Bernat Estanyol, a Catalonian farmer, and his bride, the lovely Fransesca. Then the approach of the feudal lord Llorenç …
Published by Picador, 2015, 272 pages. Using an incident in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead (about a trip that Mead—Nell Stone, in the novel—had taken with her husband to study tribes in New Guinea), Lily King turns it into a story about relationships and the inability to completely know someone, let alone an entire …
Translated from French by Melanie MauthnerPublished by Archipelago Press / Daunt Books, 2014, 240 pages. Original version published in 2012. Scholastique Mukasonga paints a picture of a country by focusing on the microcosm of a girls’ boarding school in Rwanda around 1980. Our Lady of the Nile is a secondary school for girls run by …
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Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Thorndike Press, 2016, 497 pages. Original version published in 2011. Elena Ferrante has become a literary sensation in the Anglophone world with The Neopolitan Quartet, books about a friendship between two women. The books not only chart the story of Elena and Lila’s friendship over several decades but …
Published by Knopf / Longman, 1986, 350 pages.Review by Sadhana Ramchander The power a woman or an animal has when she is a mother—this is the idea that is central to Fiela's Child. It also asks the question—is identity, which people give utmost importance to—an abstract thing after all? It is a gripping story, set …
Published by Aleph Book Company, 2012, 235 pages. Both books I’ve read this month—Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom—have been excellent. And the year has only just begun! Em and the Big Hoom is a moving, funny account of living with a mentally ill, suicidal mother—Em of the …
Published by Quercus Publishing / Silver Oak, 2011, 528 pages. Peter May has written an atmospheric and intricately plotted novel set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The Blackhouse is a police procedural and a story about a man forced to come to terms with his past. Fin McLeod is …
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 240 pages. “I had imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line.” These are the words of a voracious reader, a hopeless romantic in love with Ginger Rogers—and a rat. Firmin is born in the basement of Pembroke Books, a …
Continue reading Firmin—The Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife: Sam Savage
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