Authors: Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Andrew Michael Hurley, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Natasha Pulley, Elizabeth Macneal, Bridget Collins, Stuart Turton, Jess Kidd, Catriona Ward, Susan Stokes-Chapman, Laura PurcellPublished by Sphere, 2023, 464 pages. Twelve gifts for the twelve days of Christmas as the song goes, but there are no pipers piping, ladies dancing or a …
Continue reading The Winter Spirits—Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights
Photo: Yulia Grigoryeva via Shutterstock The year 2023 is almost at an end—where did it go? But the community of readers always seem to find time to read—or to listen to books. So, as always, my request for the best books you read this year has yielded a long and varied list. There are overlaps. …
Published by Profile Books, 2011, 384 pages.Review by Rishad Patell A difficult book to review. On one hand, John Gimlette’s book on the northern coast of South America provides a great deal of insight into the countries of Guyana and Suriname and the French department of French Guiana. Often ignored in travel writing and rarely …
Continue reading Wild Coast—Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge: John Gimlette
Photo: Joanna Szymkiewicz Doreen Cunningham is an Irish-British writer, who was born in Wales. She is the author of Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales, which won the 2020 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction; and was shortlisted for The Pat Kavanagh Award and the 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay …
Continue reading Travelling with Whales: An Interview with Doreen Cunningham
Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Translated from Czech by Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova and George TheinerPublished by Faber & Faber / W. W. Norton & Company, 1973, 288 pages. Original version published in 1966. Meet Lieutenant Boruvka of the Czechoslovak police: a rotund man with baby blue eyes, a tuft of hair on top of his head, and a mournful …
Continue reading The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka: Josef Skvorecky
Translated from Spanish by Jethro SoutarPublished by And Other Stories, 2014, 275 pages. Original version published in 2008. “[F]or our island was all alone at sea and there was no other land we could join forces with to combat our lack of everything. It was around then that I realised we islanders had no one …
Continue reading By Night the Mountain Burns: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
Published by Motifs / Le Serpent à Plumes, 1994, 177 pages. Published in English as The Land without Shadows, University of Virginia Press, 2005. Translated from French by Jeanne Garane. A man forgets his own language and finds himself speaking Creole; a young woman runs away from her village to escape an arranged marriage to …
Published by Harper Collins, 2022, 295 pages. “The people, the smells, the voices, the yearning, the hands clutching bellies—for that’s where their few precious belongings were—the odour of fear, the taste of dislocation, the sounds of desperation: that is what Gurdev sensed all around him when they reached Lahore station.” In 1947, when India was …
Self portrait by Slavko Milekić Slavko Milekić is a Serbian author, artist, translator and neuropsychologist, who now lives in Mexico. His books include Word Beads (2019), a collection of short stories, which he also illustrated; and The Theory of Language (1999), which he cowrote with Steven Weisler. Slavko teaches Cognitive Science and Digital Design at …
Continue reading Combining Languages and Images: An Interview with Slavko Milekić
Talking About Books 