Translated from Russian by Boris DralyukPublished by MacLehose Press, 2017, 352 pages. This is a strange, dreamlike book. Four men are on journeys across the Soviet Union that make no sense, in a landscape where the laws of physics don’t seem to exist anymore. The journeys start sometime around the end of the Second World …
The World’s Wife: Carol Ann Duffy
Published by Faber & Faber / Picador, 1999, 96 pages. History and myth have often focused on men: Sisyphus, Lazarus, Herod, Pilate, Midas, Faust, Freud… But what of their wives? Who were they and what did they think of their men? These women are brought to life in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems. The …
The Heart’s Invisible Furies: John Boyne
Published by Penguin / Thorndike Press, 2017, 961 pages. The book begins in Ireland in the 1940s: The Catholic Church is all-powerful, and anything outside the norm is not only frowned upon but punished. For example, having a child outside marriage, as Catherine Goggin, a pregnant teenager in an Irish village finds out. She …
Celestial Bodies: Jokha Alharthi
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn BoothPublished by Sandstone Press, 2018, 256 pages. Original version published in 2010. Celestial Bodies is a novel by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi that won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. This makes it unusual—there aren’t a lot of books by Omani writers translated into English, and this is the …
My Name is Gauhar Jaan! The Life and Times of a Musician: Vikram Sampath
Review by Sadhana RamchanderPublished by Rupa & Co., 2010, 346 pages. I have been fascinated by Gauhar Jaan's life ever since I came to know about her. I bought this hard-bound book in the bookshop A A Hussian some years ago but it sat on my shelves for a long time. I finally read it, …
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Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Published by Ace Books / Gollancz / Corgi, 1990, 368 pages. This delightfully subversive look at the Apocalypse and everything that went before is one of my favourite books. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, have been living on Earth since the beginning. Crowley, who starts out as the serpent in the Garden of …
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Books for the lockdown
Photo by Pancholp (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Some of you have asked for books you can read during this time of lockdown and the threat of pandemic. Nothing too grim, something that will make you laugh or that will help you escape. So here is a far from exhaustive list, mostly, though not entirely, from my …
The Quarry: Iain Banks
Published by Little, Brown / Abacus, 2013, 336 pages. “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”Dylan Thomas Guy is dying and has no intention of going gentle into the good night. He summons his best friends to his crumbling house by the quarry by telling …
Mister Pip: Lloyd Jones
Published by John Murray / Hodder & Stoughton / Dial Press / Knopf Canada, 2007, 272 pages. Set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of a young girl, Matilda, who is 13 when we first meet her. The story takes places mostly in the 1990s, during the …
A Book of Silence: Sara Maitland
Published by Counterpoint / Granta Books, 2009, 320 pages. “It is quite hard to remember which came first—the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. … I became less driven, more reflective and great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in …
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