Tag Archives: memoir

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 …

Continue reading “Book review: Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle (Ireland)”

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, …

Continue reading “Book review: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (Lithuania, 1930-2009)”

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: 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)”