Women’s Prize shortlister set in and around a haunted bookshop
Tag Archives: books
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue (Cameroon)
Page-turning novel about the often false promises of the American Dream for an immigrant family from Cameroon and a US family with a senior Lehman Bros executive as breadwinner.
My 20 Books of Summer 2022
I’ve chosen my 20 books of summer.
I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir by Jan Grue (Norway)
A thought-provoking, Barbellion Prize-longlisted memoir on living with disability by Norwegian academic Jan Grue
Story of O by Pauline Réage (a pseudonym for Anne Desclos, #1954club, France)
French filth from 1954
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (France, #1954club)
A classic of French literature from 1954
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (Trinidad and Tobago)
The Mermaid of Black Conch, written by Trinidadian-born author Monique Roffey, was the winner of the Costa Book of Year prize in 2020. It is a book that we recently picked for my book club to read, although we have met very infrequently over the past two years, mainly due to the pandemic. It’s a …
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Review of The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke I’ve not stuck to my reading plans lately, but I will probably come back to that in another post. Instead, I’ve found myself reading a few short international reads, including this one, The Following Story by acclaimed Dutch writer Cees (Cornelis) Nooteboom. Although short, it’s not an easy …
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Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine)
Tragicomic masterpiece by one of Ukraine’s most well-known modern writers
Review of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi (Albania)
Much-lauded memoir of growing up in a secretive and rapidly changing Albania in the 1980 and 1990s
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 