Published by Knopf Canada / Granta Books, 2016, 480 pages. “It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a …
Continue reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Madeleine Thien
Translated from Arabic by Jonathan WrightPublished by OneWorld Publications / Penguin, 2018, 272 pages. Original version published in 2013. Ahmed Sadaawi takes the story of Frankenstein and transposes it to Baghdad in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. Bombs go off regularly on the streets and people die every …
Published by Sandstone Press, 2014, 256 pages. “Lots of writers have dared walk up to the edge of reason and stare into that great chasm, into the abyss. Very few people have got there and laughed out loud at what they saw. It’s the divine comedy.” —Bono, on Leonard Cohen You either love or hate …
Continue reading A Broken Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen’s Secret Chord—Liel Leibovitz
Published by John Murray / St. Martin's Press, 2007, 294 pages. “He closed his eyes, like so many other Parisians, during that terrible year of 1942. He had closed his eyes the day of the roundup, when he had seen all those people being driven away, packed on buses, taken God knows where. … My …
Translated from French by Helen StevensonPublished by Serpent's Tail, 2015, 280 pages. Original version published in 2014. Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, when he was 22, and didn’t go back for 23 years, not even when his mother died. Refusing to accept her death, he keeps up the myth that she is alive and …
Continue reading The Lights of Pointe-Noire: Alain Mabanckou
Published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage, 2015, 304 pages. “This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn…who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century…and of her many descendants.” This is Salman Rushdie as Scheherazade, narrating events that take place over 1,001 nights. Jinns are creatures of smoke …
Continue reading Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: Salman Rushdie
Published by Harper & Collins / Faber & Faber, 2012, 448 pages. Dellarobia Turnbow is heading up to the cabin owned by her family to meet a lover, trying to break out of the suffocating life she lives. But she never gets there. An amazing sight on an overlook on the other side of the …
Published by Penguin Hamish Hachette / John Murray, 2019, 320 pages.Review by Imran Ali Khan Amitav Ghosh’s new book, Gun Island (Penguin, Random House), has come to us three years since his last book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where Ghosh contemplates the dangers of climate change, “At exactly the time when …
Published by Viking / Penguin, 2018, 432 pages. The result of the referendum on Brexit in 2016 sent shockwaves through not only the UK, but Europe and beyond. Looking back now, the "why" is a little clearer—the anger, the fact that many voted emotionally, and the complacency of the ruling elite. In Middle England, Jonathan …
Published by Hutchinson / Arrow, 2016, 400 pages. Electing the successor to St. Peter—a man who will be the leader of the Catholic Church, the head of the Vatican and one of the most powerful spiritual leaders in the world—is carried out in strict secrecy. This secrecy and the political intrigues that go on behind …
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