Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de LangePublished by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2016, 288 pages. “Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of …
The Cure for Death by Lightning: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Published by Houghton Mifflin / Virago, 1996, 304 pages. “The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I …
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Macbeth: Jo Nesbo
Translated from Norwegian by Don BartlettPublished by Hogarth, 2018, 624 pages. Original version published in 2018. A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate. This …
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart
Published by Sort Of Books, 2009, 180 pages. It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had …
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Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling—Philip Pullman
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / David Fickling Books, 2019, 455 pages. “[T]he image of the reader is solitary. We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we’re engaged with. True, we can come back and and talk about …
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Written in Black: K.H. Lim
Published by Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd., 2015, 240 pages. Jonathan is a 10-year-old boy in Brunei. He lives with his father and brother Aaron and sister Jen. His mother has gone away, ostensibly for health reasons, and his older brother Michael left to join a rock band. When the book starts, Jonathan’s uncle, Ah Peh, …
Warlight: Michael Ondaatje
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / Vintage, 2019, 289 pages.Review by Usha Raman “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.”“We order our lives with barely held stories” Memory is a strange thing; it reveals the ephemeral nature of experience and the power of its reconstruction. It builds …
Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami
Translated from Japanese by Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage, 2005, 505 pages. Original version published in 2002. A man talks to cats, fish and leeches rain down from the sky, a man dressed like Johnny Walker (of whisky fame) is making a flute from cats’ souls, and a stone opens the door to another world. Welcome …
Frida Folk: Gaby Franger
Review by Sadhana Ramchander Book translated from German by Gita WolfPublished by Tara Books, 2018, 192 pages. Original version published in 2018. Frida Folk celebrates, in an unusual manner, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her many ‘avatars’. This is indeed a fascinating book! It documents an unbelievable variety of interpretations of Frida—the woman and …
Exit West: Mohsin Hamid
Published by Hamish Hamilton / Penguin, 2017, 240 pages. A man and a woman meet in a city in what is probably Syria and fall in love. Civil war is initially just a distant presence in their lives. But then it all starts to fall apart, and strange doors start opening up, leading out of …
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