Short Icelandic novel guaranteed to spark anxiety in anyone involved in academic research
Tag Archives: female writers
Book review: Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle (Ireland)
Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking is a collection of personal essays by Irish medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. Sub-(sub-)titled Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past, the book was published in 2022 by Penguin, and (appropriately enough) I’ve read it during Cathy‘s Reading …
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Book review: Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Israel)
A searing thriller dealing with guilt, privilege and immigrants in the Negev desert
Book review: Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn (Scotland)
An unexpectedly optimistic exploration of abandoned places worldwide
Travelling while Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola (Kenya)
Billed by the author as “not a travel memoir”, this is also a polemic about the injustices of migration policy and racism
Book review: Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya)
The UK’s Observer described Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s 2014 novel Dust as “the most important novel to come out of Africa since Half of a Yellow Sun“, but I struggled with it. The book opens in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, where a young man, Odidi, is gunned down, leaving his family devastated by grief. …
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Book review: Practicalities by Marguerite Duras (France, 1914-96)
Reflections on life, love and alcohol by Marguerite Duras
Book review: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (Lithuania, 1930-2009)
I hadn’t come across this classic of children’s literature until my son was assigned it as a year 8 (age 12-13) text. Published in 1968, The Endless Steppe is a memoir of Esther Hautzig’s childhood experiences during WWII, when she and her family were exiled to Siberia. Hautzig was born in what is now Vilnius, …
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Book review: Children of the Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi (Finland)
Speculative fiction from Finland, with strange finds on a 19th century anthropological mission
Book review: Between Two Worlds by Miriam Tlali (South Africa)
Ground-breaking critique of apartheid by a black woman writer