Category Archives: Travel Guides
Still Counting the Dead
The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns and other
The Saffron Road: A Journey with Buddha`s Daughters
A brief meeting with a Buddhist nun in India made a deep impression on Christine Toomey. It sent her on a two year, 60,000-mile odyssey to learn more about the contemporary women choosing in their thousands to become part of a long tradition of female spirituality that stretches back through the centuries and now embraces
Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia`s Haunted Hinterland
From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world`s last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought
The End of Days
From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who barely suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps
A Time for Everything
What if God exists? What if angels are real? What if we treated religious tracts, including the Bible, as empirical evidence of the supernatural world? Karl Ove Knausgaard`s major novel, `A Time For Everything`, is about God and his angels. It posits that angels are real, and that God exists. It posits, further, that heavenly
The Nakano Thrift Shop
Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano`s thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss – or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there working behind the till. Nor are her fellow employees any less
The Vegetarian: A Novel
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more `plant-like` existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism
Swallowing Mercury
Wiola lives in a close-knit agricultural community. Wiola has a black cat called Blackie. Wiola`s father was a deserter but now he is a taxidermist. Wiola`s mother tells her that killing spiders brings on storms. Wiola must never enter the seamstress`s `secret` room. Wiola collects matchbox labels. Wiola is a good Catholic girl brought up
Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90 Percent of Everything
There are 100,000 freighters on the seas. Between them they carry nearly everything we eat, wear and work with. And yet this massive global industry has remained largely unexamined: it passes by out of sight for most of us and, through the `flags of convenience` system, its dubious practices often slip under the radar of
Go, Went, Gone
One of the great contemporary European writers takes on Europe`s biggest issue Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Oranienplatz, he
The Black Lake
Amid the lush abundance of Java`s landscape, two boys spend their days exploring the vast lakes and teeming forests. But as time passes the boys come to realize that their shared sense of adventure cannot bridge the gulf between their backgrounds, for one is the son of a Dutch plantation owner, and the other the
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Three bearsThe first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia.The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus.The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of the 21st century.Here, then, is the enchanting story of three extraordinary bears, brought to
The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors
The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. One day, the houses will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they
Four Soldiers
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019`I am astonished by Four Soldiers. I have never read anything like it, yet it is one of those books you feel must always have existed, a classic of writing about the human condition… A small miracle` Hilary Mantel1919. The Russian Civil War. It is the harsh dead
The Appointment
`I`ve been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.` So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu`s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men`s suits bound for Italy. `Marry me`, the notes say, with
The Collector of Leftover Souls: Dispatches from Brazil
Welcome to the favela, welcome to the rainforest, welcome to the real Brazil. This is the Brazil where a factory worker is loyal to his company for decades, only to find out that they knew the product he was making would eventually poison him. This is the Brazil where the mothers of the favela expect
Learning to Lose
It is the day of Sylvia`s 16th birthday and her life as an adult is about to begin – not with the party she had been planning, but with a car-crash. At the wheel is a talented young footballer, just arrived from Buenos Aires, and set for stardom on and off the pitch.As their destinies
My Friend Jesus Christ
When Nick is 13, he loses his parents in a car-crash. His sister, seven years his elder, is left to look after him. As he grows up, she longs to lose this brotherly millstone around her neck, but he cannot bear the thought of losing her protection. So Nick goes to extremes to retain her
The Falafel King is Dead
Raw, lyrical, shocking and moving, “The Falafel King is Dead” is Sara Shilo`s powerful debut novel recounting the life of an ordinary Israeli family over the course of a single, extraordinary day in prose that we have never been encountered in contemporary Hebrew literature.The town has lost its famed falafel king, but the Dadon family
The Baby of Belleville
Jane de la Rochefoucault has just brought home her firstborn and her world is in chaos.As well as the nappies, the night-time gurgling, and the constant feeding, she can barely move for packing cases and the cumbersome musical instruments that her aristocratic French composer husband keeps inventing. And then one evening, a knock on the
