Yoko Ogawa: The Diving Pool
According to the inside flap Yoko Agawa has written more than twenty books and won every major Japanese literary award. Where else is there for her to go? Either it’s…
Belinda Webb: A Clockwork Apple
There’s an old idiom that states you can’t compare apples to oranges but in the case of Belinda Webb’s A Clockwork Apple (2008) you can’t help compare it to Anthony…
Rowan Somerville: The End Of Sleep
The mere mention of Cairo conjures up a collage of images to me – of an aged city caught in the shadow of the Pyramids; of a twisted network of…
Robin Jenkins: The Changeling
For the last few years, I’ve been aware of Robin Jenkins’s books, notably his best known work, The Cone Gatherers, as they were perennials on the Scottish Books shelves of…
Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole
At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler there is a passage on the various types of books we meet in our lives, such as…
Vladimir Nabokov: Mary
Although it was his first novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926) was not translated until 1970, and one can well imagine the author peering over translator Michael Glenny‘s shoulder as he…
Alberto Manguel: With Borges
When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges, I’m more aware of him and his contribution to letters than I am versed in him. A few short stories from Labyrinths is…
Gordon Burn: Born Yesterday
Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction – Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story – and his non-fiction –…
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus
Here begins my Roth odyssey. And where better to start than the beginning? So, with that obvious logic in mind, the first in an oeuvre spanning twenty-eight books (a mix…
Alain Elkann: Envy
Alain Elkann has, in the last thirty years, published over twenty books spanning essays, biography, and fiction. Envy (2006) is the first, as far as I’m aware, of his works…