Translated from Thai by Mui PoopoksakulPublished by Tilted Axis Press, 2017, 192 pages. Original version published in 2000. A man is intrigued by the spaces between the words a schoolgirl is writing in her diary, a couple discover a corpse on the roof crushed under the fallen letters from a neon sign, a group of …
Category: The reading challenge
West African Books with Unconventional Approaches to Gender and Power (from Electric Lit)
One of the things this blog tries to do is to highlight books from outside the usual UK-US cannon. We live in a rich, varied world, and as readers, we are ideally placed to explore this richness through books. This is what lay behind the reading challenge that some of us set ourselves. From time …
Tales of the Tikongs: Epeli Hau’ofa
Published by University of Hawaii Press, 1994, 93 pages. If this book were to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “‘Development’ comes to a small Pacific island”. Tales of the Tikongs is a collection of vignettes of what happens when foreign development experts try to impose development on a happy-go-lucky people. And …
Leaves of the Banyan Tree: Albert Wendt
Published by University of Hawaii Press, 1994, 426 pages. I didn’t know much about Samoa when I started reading this. I had come across parts of Margaret Mead’s 1928 anthropological study a long time ago, a study that was later proven to be inaccurate and misleading. And Robert Louis Stevenson spent his last years there. …
Paradise of the Blind: Duong Thu Huang
Translated from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPhersonPublished by Penguin / William Morrow Paperbacks, 1993, 274 pages. Original version published in 1988. It seems like a lot of the stories about Viet Nam are about the war, and that too from the American perspective. The country itself seems to disappear, merely providing a …
Kaveena: Boubacar Boris Diop
Translated from French by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. HanaburghPublished by Indiana University Press, 2016, 246 pages. Original version published in 2006. This novel is set in an unnamed African country and starts against a backdrop of civil unrest. The head of the secret service, Col. Asante Kroma, is looking for the deposed president, N’Zo …
The Pledge: Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Translated from German by Joel AgeePublished by University of Chicago Press / Pushkin Vertigo, 1959, 192 pages. Original version published in 1958. The book starts with the narrator travelling to Chur in Switzerland to give a lecture on the art of writing detective stories. The talk is not a success, and the writer meets Dr. …
Zig-zagging around the world
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith / The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal / The Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak / The Black Box by Alek Popov, translated from Bulgarian by Daniella and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de LupePublishing details belowReview …
Brick Lane: Monica Ali
Published by Doubleday / Black Swan, 2003, 416 pages. A portrait of the Bangladeshi community in London, Brick Lane follows Nazneen, a young girl from a village in Bangladesh who is married off to Chanu, an older Bangladeshi man, and moves with him to the UK. During her early years in London, Nazneen’s world is …
Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Translated from Russian by Keith GessenPublished by Picador / Dalkey Archive Press, 2005, 240 pages. Original version published in 1997. "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." On 26 April 1986, Energy Block No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was …
Continue reading Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Talking About Books 