Speculative fiction from Finland, with strange finds on a 19th century anthropological mission
Category Archives: book
Book review: Between Two Worlds by Miriam Tlali (South Africa)
Ground-breaking critique of apartheid by a black woman writer
Book review: Down Second Avenue by Es’kia Mphahlele (1919-2008, South Africa)
Down Second Avenue is a work of non-fiction, sometimes sub-titled “Growing Up in a South African Ghetto”, that documents the formative years of Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele, dubbed the “father of black South African writing”. The book was first published in the UK in 1959, and in the USA in 1971, and I read the Penguin …
Continue reading “Book review: Down Second Avenue by Es’kia Mphahlele (1919-2008, South Africa)”
Book review – Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn
A mixture of memoir and historical study, reflecting on what is lost – and what remains
Book review: Summertime by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa)
Highly entertaining, often quite funny, and neatly erudite reflection on issues of authorship, identity and memory by the South African Nobel laureate
Book Review: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (UK)
I read a very enjoyable non-fiction book by Polly Barton, who is a translator of literature from Japanese, which was published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Fitzcarraldo produce such beautiful books, that I’d be tempted to buy them for home decor reasons alone! Fifty Sounds combines three of my interests: memoir, language acquisition …
Continue reading “Book Review: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (UK)”
Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
A Bosnian novel of sickness and recovery informed by personal experience
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (Germany)
Classic tale of a disturbing, febrile obsession
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan)
Kafkaesque novel of ideas by Mohsin Hamid
Passing by Nella Larsen (USA)
A 1929 novel focusing on ambiguous racial identity, that has surely inspired Brit Bennett’s bestselling 2020 novel ‘The Vanishing Half’