Book news, reviews and recommendations
This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. There’s more fiction telling the story of the Second World War from the German point-of-view these days but […]
Blasts from the Past: Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi (1994) Read More »
I read Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford’s Business as Usual back in the early days of Covid. Wonderfully diverting, it was just what was needed at such an anxious, difficult time. Drawing on Stafford’s experience as an ambulance driver in London’s blitz, Army Without Banners is very different, spanning fifteen months during which London was
If you want an introduction to literature from around the world, much of it hardly known to English speakers but often celebrated in its country of origin, you might like to keep an eye on Pushkin Press’s list. Willem Frederik Hermans’ An Untouched House is a fine example. Set towards the end of the Second
An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans (transl. David Colmer): The folly of war Read More »
This is one of those novels about which there was a good deal of excited chatter in my neck of the Twitter woods so I approached it with a degree of caution. A few chapters in and any concerns that it might have been overhyped were quashed. It opens in 1943. John Easley finds himself
The Wind is Not a River by Bryan Payton: A love that knows no bounds Read More »
There’s an awful lot of war around at the moment. Sadly, the real kind is always with us but it seems to be more widespread in fiction than usual, an inevitable result of the First World War centenary I suppose. Having already reviewed Anna Hope’s Wake and Helen Dunmore’s The Lie I’d sworn off war
Of Love and Other Wars by Sophie Hardach: A different sort of war novel Read More »
Three German soldiers – Bauer, Emmerich and an unnamed narrator – stride out into the frigid Polish winter, their minds on keeping warm and their empty stomachs. They’ve missed breakfast, determined to avoid the daily round of executions by volunteering to hunt down Jews and bring them back to the camp. Emmerich frets about his