Reading and Watching the World: Books, Film and Art
There's a whole world out there! I'm an experienced, UK-based editor and a bit of an aesthetic dilettante. I'm making it my off-duty duty to bring to your attention books, films, artists, music and TV from all over the world. Reviews are SPOILER FREE. New posts every week. See Reviews by country for my reviews from each nation.
Review no 162 Book 5 of my #20booksofsummer The God of Small Things is one of those books that everyone reading this will have heard of, but I don’t suppose everyone will have read. It won the Booker Prize in 1997 and rapidly became the biggest-selling work of Indian fiction by a non-expat writer. Arundhati …
Continue reading “The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (India)”
New Zealand supernatural comedy mockumentary series currently streaming on Sky
Mawkish film from Thailand
FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA First published in 2007, Tahmima Anam’s intimate civil war tale A Golden Age won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best First Book and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. The edition I read was published in 2012 as part of the Canongate ‘the Canons‘ list, which …
Continue reading “Review no 141: A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh)”
Ron Mueck’s perception-challenging, hyper-realistic sculpture: anything but life-size
a choose your own adventure book from Indonesia
An astoundingly original, technically ambitious, magical realist novel set in a sort of alternative Tasmania
Exceptional, highly influential writing from New Zealand
A look at the work of contemporary Chinese conceptual artist Ai WeiWei
Poetic auto fiction from Ocean Vuong
