Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More
I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience FIVE books, FIVE films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
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 …
Continue reading “Book review: Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle (Ireland)”
A book that mixes gritty reality with fable and a world of the imagination
NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA This is a bit of a throwback post, as some of it was first posted by me in 2019, and was in fact my fifth ever review on the blog. I’m re-posting with some additional discussion of publication prospects in the West for Turkish authors, as part of …
Continue reading “Elif Shafak’s novel ’10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World’ (Turkey)”
Hallucinatory 1940s coming of age tell set in upper middle class England between the wars
Translated by Daniel Hahn AFRICA The trouble with reading books from around the world is that there are so many war stories. Sometimes it feels as though every work of translated fiction I read is set in a war zone, past or present. Obviously I recognise the importance of hearing people’s stories and being informed …
Continue reading “Review no 41: José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion (Angola)”
Translated from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas AFRICA So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel (rare in African literature) and seminal African feminist work that laments injustices in the female experience in Senegal. The book was published in French in 1979, and first appeared in English in 1981. It has been judged to be …
Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA This is a strange book with an excellent title, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker international prize. (I often wonder what prompts a particular book to be translated into English, …
Continue reading “Review no 31: Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq)”
Sexually adventurous, ditzy, Weimar-era heroine Doris has quite the adventures in 1930s Berlin.
FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith When it came to choosing a female South Korean writer, there was really no choice to be made. Han Kang is a previous winner of the Man Booker International Prize, and two of her novels recently made it onto the top 5 …
Continue reading “Review no 27: Han Kang, Human Acts (South Korea)”
“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “How can a man fall off a sled? It’s not possible, yet you, you managed to do it. I saw you rolling down like a seal’s bladder, and I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 