Noo Saro-Wiwa is a writer and freelance journalist, born in Nigeria and brought up in the UK. She is the author of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, which was nominated by The Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. It was also selected by The Sunday Times as its Travel …
Continue reading Navigating Nigeria: An Interview with Noo Saro-Wiwa
Translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-BursaćPublished by Seven Stories Press UK, 2021, 223 pages. Original version published in 2016. “Everyone is running from someone, or from their own past.” Corruption and the long shadows thrown by war are at the heart of this political thriller from Croatia. Nora, a young journalist in Zagreb, is sent …
Continue reading We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day: Ivana Bodrožić
Translated from Portuguese by Helena Cavendish de Moura with Andrew Michael BrownPublished in a bilingual edition by Casa Forte Press, 2017, 123 pages. Original version published in 2017. Lula Falcão is an award-winning journalist, political advocate and writer. His criticism of the current President Jai Bolsonaro has landed him on the list of “intellectuals to …
Continue reading Vultures in the Living Room and Other Stories: Lula Falcão
Published by One (Pushkin Press), 2018, 352 pages. A madman prophesies that a boy will be killed by a fisherman. The fear created by the prophecy changes the boy. But will the fear itself lead to the murder or is the madman able to see the future? The Fishermen is narrated by Ben, looking back …
Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage, 2011, 944 pages. Original version published in 2009-2010. Prepare to walk into Haruki Murakami’s strange world. You can slip through the thin barrier between this world and an alternate one simply by taking an emergency exit off a highway or ghost-writing a particular book. …
Photo: Charlotte Graham Stuart Turton is a British novelist and journalist. His first book, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, won the First Novel Award at the 2018 Costa Book Awards, and Best Novel at the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. His second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, won the 2020 Books …
Continue reading Keeping Readers on Edge: An Interview with Stuart Turton
Translated from French by Linda CoverdalePublished by Penguin / Rizzoli International Publications, 2014, 243 pages. Original version published in 2011. “I’d promised myself that before I turned forty I would live as a hermit deep in the woods.” That was Sylvain Tesson’s promise to himself, a promise that he kept. Tesson spent six months in …
Continue reading Consolations of the Forest—Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga: Sylvain Tesson
Published by Penguin Press, 2020, 259 pages. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Vesta, a woman in her 70s, has recently been widowed. After her husband’s death, she sells her house and buys an isolated cabin near a lake across the country, …
Published by Scribner, 2017, 448 pages. New York, 1934. Eddie takes his 11-year-old daughter Anna to a meeting with Dexter Styles, a gangster who has married the daughter of a well-known New York senator. As they drive up to Styles’s house by the beach, Anna notices that her father is nervous, something that is unusual …
Published by Vintage and Penguin, 1979, 312 pages. I read The Snow Leopard when I was in my early 20s, and I loved it enough to put it on my list of 10 favourite books—where it has stayed since then. Published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is a classic, blending travel and philosophy. Peter Matthiessen …
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