The cover of this slender anthology says it all. It looks like an embroidered piece of naïve art: A boy and a girl in folksy attire sit under an apple tree. But look closer and you will notice a laptop on their knees. Slovakia, the illustrator Ivana Šáteková indicates, is not a rural idyll in [&
This is a remarkable debut novel by a young Czech writer and, I predict, only the first of many more remarkable novels by Jaroslav Kalfar. He writes in English, is not yet thirty, was born and brought up in Prague, moved to the USA aged fifteen where he learned English, then studied English literatu
This is one of the most delightful books I’ve read for some time. It’s usual to refer to such things as ‘un-putdownable’, but the great pleasure of The Revolution of the Moon is to put it aside every now and then, to sit back to savour the twists and turns of both the plot and […]
Although Kjell Ola Dahl is one of the grand old men of Nordic Noir (well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, he’s not quite 60!), he’s not that well-known in the UK. His best-known novels revolve around a pair of Oslo detectives, Gunnarstranda and Frølich. Faithless is the seventh in the series
This month we visit Lithuania, Norway, Italy and both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Our resident crime fiction reviewer, Max Easterman, is on a roll with TWO reviews, and I review a superb satire by the young Czech author Jaroslav Kalfar, who I interviewed at this year’s Hay Festival. Remember
Last week, English PEN announced its latest list of PEN Translates award winners. The list includes books translated from 14 languages and 16 countries, including a Uyghur memoir, Palestinian short stories, Somali poetry, a Czech feminist novel, an anthology of Russian women literature, Belarusi
