Published by Picador / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Bantam Press, 2014, 320 pages. “Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.” Especially when the owl sees it as a game, pecking at the razor at the end of each stroke and trying to eat the shaving cream. Meet Mumble, the Tawny Owl …
Category: Non-Fiction
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart
Published by Sort Of Books, 2009, 180 pages. It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had …
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Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling—Philip Pullman
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / David Fickling Books, 2019, 455 pages. “[T]he image of the reader is solitary. We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we’re engaged with. True, we can come back and and talk about …
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Frida Folk: Gaby Franger
Review by Sadhana Ramchander Book translated from German by Gita WolfPublished by Tara Books, 2018, 192 pages. Original version published in 2018. Frida Folk celebrates, in an unusual manner, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her many ‘avatars’. This is indeed a fascinating book! It documents an unbelievable variety of interpretations of Frida—the woman and …
Women Travellers Tell their Stories
Think of all the travel books that you have read: how many of them are written by men? Almost all? And yet women have been travelling and writing about it for as long as men. As a reviewer for the website, Women on the Road, I have spent the last few years reading these books. …
Winter Journal: Paul Auster
Published by Henry Holt & Co / Picador, 2012, 240 pages. Memories are not linear; they have a chronology all their own. In Winter Journal, Paul Auster looks back at his life, meandering back and forth in time. He is the 63-year-old man climbing out of bed to look at the snow turning the trees …
Life’s sentences
Published by Picador, 2015, 60 pages.Review by Usha Raman I have several books of poetry on my shelf...and now, on my Kindle. I leaf (or swipe) through them in the spaces between fiction, when I am recovering from an intense or troubling story or when the weather puts me in the mood for contemplation rather …
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree: Chris Stewart
Published by Sort of Books, 2003, 240 pages. Many of us dream of giving up the rat race and living the simple life in a community far removed from the hustle of cities. These remain dreams for most of us, but not for Chris Stewart and his wife Ana. In 1988, they moved to Alpujarras …
Catching Thunder—The True Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase: Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter
Translated from Norwegian by Diane Oatley.Published by Zed Books, 2018, 400 pages.Review by Susanne Karine Gjønnes This true-life crime novel, Catching Thunder: The Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase, is the dramatic account of Sea Shepherd’s 110-day long international pursuit of the pirate fishing vessel Thunder. Sea Shepherd is a group of activists committed …
Of Human Freedom: Epictetus
Translated from Greek by Robert DobbinPublished by Penguin, 2010, 112 pages. The original Discourses of Epictetus were written down in 108 AD.Review by Thomas Peak This magical little book comes from a time and place far, far away. It is adapted from the Discourses written by Epictetus, an emancipated Greek slave living in the Roman …
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