The Earth Beneath My Feet and On Sacred Ground: Andrew TerrillPublished by Enchanted Rock Press, 2021, 357 pages / 2022, 397 pages. “Finding places that called as though I belonged was one of the reasons I’d started The Walk. ... In truth, I was walking to be somewhere, not get somewhere. My goal was to …
Continue reading From Calabria, Italy, to North Cape, Norway: A Walk through Europe’s Wild Places
Translated from Norwegian by Damion SearlsPublished by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023, 46 pages. Original version published in 2023. A man drives without a destination, out of boredom. He continues driving until the road takes him into a forest, and his car gets stuck on the forest road. He gets out of the car and instead of …
Translated from French by Howard CurtisPublished by Penguin, 2022, 196 pages. First translated into English in 1960. Original version published in 1949. “It was the third of December and still raining. ... In fact, for the last twenty days, it had been raining almost without interruption.” It started raining in the small French town of …
Published by Top Shelf, 2019, 208 pages. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, the US government declared that all people of Japanese origin were “enemy aliens”, including those who were US citizens. They were rounded up and incarcerated. The assumption was that their race made them “nonassimilable” and …
Shugri Said Salh is a Somali writer, now living in San Diego, USA. Her memoir, The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert (2021) won the 2022 Gold Nautilus Award, Multicultural and Indigenous Category; and was a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the 2021 CALIBA/Golden Poppy Award; as well as …
Continue reading Growing Up in the Somali Desert: An Interview with Shugri Said Salh
Published by Raven Books / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 332 pages. It is the end of the world as we know it. A black fog has swept through the world, destroying every living thing in its wake: “the fog kills anything it touches...Unfortunately, it covers the entire earth, except for our island and half a mile …
Continue reading The Last Murder at the End of the World: Stuart Turton
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, published by Grove Press, 2023, 320 pages.The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton, 2023, 645 pages. Review by Usha Raman The scariest dystopian novels are those that seem to be set on the inside edge of our times. Anyone who reads the daily news (or worse, watches …
Published by Pushkin Vertigo, 2022, 350 pages. The best crime fiction is more than just a whodunnit—it shines a light on the darker side of society. This is true of Nilanjana Roy’s Black River: it is dark, heart-breaking and ultimately redemptive. Munia is a little girl who lives with her father Chand, a farmer, in …
Translated from French by Geoffrey StrachanPublished by Maclehose Press, 2010, 201 pages. Original version published in 2007. This is a story narrated by Raj, an old man looking back at a crucial period in his childhood, a time that changed his life forever. Raj grows up in Mapou, a village in the north of Mauritius, …
Published by Faber / HarperCollins, 2022, 548 pages. “My thinking here is to put everything in the order of how it happened, give or take certain intervals of a young man skunked out of his skull box, some dots duly connected. But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. …
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