The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 密やかな結晶 (The Memory Police). The novel is set on a remote island in an unnamed country. The narrator is an unnamed female novelist. The basic theme is that gradually things are disappearing. The Memory Police declare that a thing no longer exists – stamps, jewels, rose bushes -the list continues to grow – and people get rid of them and then forget they ever existed. However some people do not forget and, if found out, are taken away by the Memory Police. Many of them are hidden away in safe houses but are often found. As R, the narrator’s edito ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Alison Langley‘s Budapest Noir Ilona Gets a Phone. Ilona is a sixty-one year old Hungarian woman. Communism has fallen and she is finally allowed a phone, previously denied as her husband had been killed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Her son, Emil, had defected to the USA when still a minor and is planning to come to Budapest on a Fulbright scholarship. Ilona had been an aristocrat and the family castle had been confiscated but they can now get it back provided they compensate the current occupants – an old people’s home. Ilona is disappointed that ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Gabriel García Márquez‘s En Agosto Nos Vemos (Until August). This is his last book – a novella – published well after his death and one he asked not be published. It tells of a forty-six year old woman who is happily married to an orchestra conductor. Her mother had asked to be buried on a remote island, which she visited regularly during her life and her daughter will continue to visit every year after her death, staying in a rundown hotel. On one occasion she meets a man and they have a quick fling in her hotel room though she is furious when she finds h ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 密会 (Secret Rendezvous). Even by Abe’s standards this is a seriously weird book. A jump shoe salesman and his wife are woken up at 4 am. by an ambulance which has come to take the wife to hospital. They did not summon the ambulance and she is in good health. Nevertheless the ambulance takes her. At the hospital she goes to the waiting room to phone her husband and seemingly disappears. He arrives later and is led on a wild goose chase by a man called the horse (see cover illustration). The hospital is more than a hospital (a lot of sex is involve ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Gün G. Ayurzana‘s Бөөгийн домог [Legend of the Shaman]. This Mongolian novel is, as the title tells us, is about shamanism. Tengiz has had an unhappy love affair. He goes to Lake Baikal where he meets Khagdai. a practising shaman. Khagdai has had a hard life, sent to an asylum in the Soviet purge of shamanism but he is now a practising shaman. He has never had an apprentice but now Tengiz becomes his apprentice we and he learn about the history, practice, mysteries and myths and legends of shamanism. Healing is part of it but communing with the omgods (spi ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Agustina Bessa-Luís‘s A Sibila [The Sibyl]. The novel tells the story of Quina, a Portuguese woman in a male-dominated society. Her father spends his money on women and gets involved in a bitter dispute over water rights which he loses, dying soon after. The cost to the family means the loss a of a dowry for the daughters, which Quina does not regret though her sister does. Quina soon takes charge of he family farm , outmanoeuvring her lazy brothers. Though she is close to her niece and adopts an orphan boy, she never marries and does not have children of ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Margherita Giacobino‘s L’età ridicola (The Ridiculous Age). This novel tells the story of an unnamed elderly woman whio is aware that death is not far away. She lives in an upstairs flat in a city with her also very elderly cat. She has an immigrant carer, Gabriela,. She has a close friend Malvina, whom she sees every day but Malvina has more advanced dementia and when she is scammed her nephew puts her in a home where she gets worse. Our narrator ruminates on death and dying, considering euthanasia and suicide. She sees the world outside getting worse (te ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Diego Marani‘s La città celeste (The Celestial City). This is a humorous, colourful, (semi-)autobiographical account of a young Italian man going to Trieste to study translation and interpreting and his time there. His main motive is to escape his strict, domineering father. However, in his various activities – studying, partying, falling in love, smuggling (Trieste is next to the then Italy-Yugoslavia border), journalism and growing up, he discovers not just Trieste but lots of different Triestes and soon realises that Trieste is not just an Italian city ..read more

I have now read twenty Palestinian novels in a row. Initially I thought I might struggle to find twenty, given that I had already read a few but it was not a problem. Whether it was wise to read twenty Palestinian novels in a row is another matter. All of them, without exception, showed to some degree the sufferings of the Palestinians. A significant number dealt with the various occupations – Ottoman, British and Jewish – and in all cases the Palestinians were clearly the victims, from having their country taken away from them, their land stolen and crops destroyed to rape, imprisonment, murd ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Ahlam Bsharat‘s الاار للناس الغائبين (Trees for the Absentees). This novella follows the story of a young Palestinian woman, Philistia. Her father is in an Israeli jail. She has helped her grandmother who was both a corpse washer and a midwife/baby washer. The grandmother is now dead. Philistia wants to go to university in Nablus and gets a job as a washer/scrubber in the women’s hammam (public baths) where she sees her dead grandmother. She also sees – first in her dreams and then in the streets – Bayrakdar, imaginary to everyone else but very real to her ..read more