Book news, reviews and recommendations
Lots of new fiction to keep those of us in the Northern Hemisphere interested through the winter months beginning with one I’m particularly keen to read. Danish writer Helle Helle’s This Should Be Written in the Present Tense was one of my books of 2014 raising hopes for they translated by Martin Aitken, a name […]
Books to Look Out For in February 2026: Part One Read More »
The Five Summer Books post in this series proved very popular; I suspect this one won’t attract quite so much attention. Most of us prefer basking in a bit of summer sun if we get the chance but the five books below might make you feel glad to be cosy and inside on a bleak
Five Winter Books I’ve Read Read More »
Set in seventeenth-century Denmark, Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child grew out of HEX, her play which premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in 2023. It’s narrated by the titular wax child moulded by Christenze Kruckow, an impoverished noblewoman charged with witchcraft. Is that what harmful magic is? The thing everyone did to stop the hiccups?
This second batch of September’s new fiction kicks off with one of the year’s big titles just as the first did. As Elizabeth Strout fans will know, many of her characters recur throughout her loosely connected series of novels, rather as they do in Kent Haruf’s Holt books. In Tell Me Everything, it’s Bob Burgess
Books to Look Out For in September 2024: Part Two Read More »
If 2020 had gone according to plan I’d have posted about our four-day break in the lovely city of Ghent in March and we’d be enjoying ourselves in Northern Italy right now. So strange are the times we’re living in that I’m just relieved that everyone I know is safe rather than disappointed but I
Pandemic Travels From My Sofa: Scandinavia Read More »
We’re on the home stretch, now, heading towards the end of 2019, and already anticipating the shiny and new in 2020. September, which I like to call late summer stretching that in to October weather permitting, began with Etgar Keret’s Fly Already a collection of twenty punchy, inventive short stories, some no longer than a
Books of the Year 2019: Part Four Read More »
Although I’ve yet to read Hanne Ørstavik’s The Blue Room reviews of it by bloggers whose opinions I trust were enough to convince me that Love was likely to be something special. This spare novella tells the story of Vibeke and her son, Jon, on the eve of his ninth birthday, each, unbeknownst to the
Love by Hanne Ørstavik (transl. Martin Aitken): In the deep midwinter Read More »
Back from Portugal – more of which next week – with part two of November’s preview which has its feet firmly placed in Europe with one novel set in Norway, two in Germany, one in France and two in the UK. Let’s work our way south, starting in a remote small town in northern Norway
Books to Look Out For in November 2019: Part Two Read More »
Don’t you just love that jacket? Having sounded off about the ghastliness of the Aren’t We Sisters? cover a few weeks ago I had to mention it. Brightly coloured, eye-catching and surprisingly well suited to what’s inside it’s perfect, well for me at least. This Should be Written in the Present Tense is a quiet,