Translated from Spanish by Frances RiddlePublished by Charco Press “She has to take the train into the city at ten o’clock...right after the medication has managed to persuade her body to follow her brain’s orders.” Elena is a woman with advanced Parkinson’s. Her daughter Rita was found hanging from the belfry in the local church. …
Travelling the World: A Woman’s Perspective
Photo: GaudiLab via Shutterstock For the past nine years, I have been reviewing travel books by women for the website Women on the Road. When I first started, I realized that almost all the travel books I had read until then were by men. For me, this opened up an entire new world of incredible …
Continue reading Travelling the World: A Woman’s Perspective
The Book of Joy—Lasting Happiness in a Changing World: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams
Published by Hutchinson “No dark fate determines the future. We do. Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet. This is the power we wield. ... “We are sharing what two friends, from very different worlds, have witnessed and …
My Bones and My Flute—A Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner: Edgar Mittelholzer
Published by Peepal Tree “In this instant my trance of introspection vanished. I knew it was actually happening. I stood and listened. There could be no doubt. It had nothing of the imaginary about it. It was a flute, clear, leisurely, distant. A tuneless, wandering trickle of treble notes coming from out of the trees …
Continue reading My Bones and My Flute—A Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner: Edgar Mittelholzer
The Best Books of 2022
Photo: Africa Studio via Shutterstock Another year has rolled around. I asked for your lists of the best books you have read in 2022, and as always, was overwhelmed by your response. There is something for everyone here. Fiction choices include novels about Argentina’s brutal dictatorship, India’s partition, unkept promises in South Africa, stories about …
The Anthropocene Reviewed—Essays on a Human-Centred Planet: John Green
Review by Kristine GouldingPublished by Random House The Anthropocene—a term that I had to Google when first faced with it—is the current geological age in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. This book comprises a series of essays that reviews different parts of the human experience, on a five-star scale: …
Continue reading The Anthropocene Reviewed—Essays on a Human-Centred Planet: John Green
Checkpoint: David Albahari
Translated from Serbian by Ellen Elias-BursaćPublished by Restless Books “We had no choice but to continue doing what we’d come there to do: guard and watch over the passing of people and goods through the checkpoint. To be honest, we hadn’t even been told whether the checkpoint was on a border lying between two countries …
The Marriage Portrait: Maggie O’Farrell
Review by Susan T. LandryPublished by Knopf and Headline Publishing Group I can't remember the exact circumstances that led me to plunge into Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet two years ago. I am a reasonably omnivorous reader, but rarely choose historical fiction when looking for a new book to get lost in. Not sure why, exactly; maybe …
Travelling Back in Time: An Interview with David Liss
David Liss is an American author. His novels include A Conspiracy of Paper, The Coffee Trader, The Devil’s Company and The Peculiarities. Most of David’s books are historical fiction, set in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2001, A Conspiracy of Paper (the first of the Benjamin Weaver series) won the Macavity Award for the …
Continue reading Travelling Back in Time: An Interview with David Liss
Nostalgia: Mircea Cărtărescu
Translated from Romanian by Julian SemilianPublished by Penguin This collection of three short stories and two novellas, set mainly in Bucharest, was written during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime and published in 1989, the year his regime fell. Nostalgia was originally published under the title Visul ("The Dream"), which seems appropriate: the pieces are fairly dreamlike and …
Talking About Books 