In this slim, rather beautiful book, with its conflagrated, scarlet binding, Giorgio van Straten treats us to a quiet firework display of vignettes on the theme of loss, suppression, destruction, forgetting, displacement, even murder. In Search of Lost Books is about the heart beat at the centre of
As co-hostess of German Literature Month, November is, of course, the highlight of my reading year. Despite having over 200 unread translations of German literature in the house, this year I decided that I would read and review at least one new-to-me recommendation. But never in my wildest dreams d
Twice a year, on mountain roads and tracks all over the world, sheep and livestock make their way between alpine summer pastures and lowland winter meadows in a practice known as transhumance. This image of shepherding flocks across the land forms the striking central metaphor of Mireille Gansel’s
This is an unputdownable, haunting read that left me with the same shattering feeling I had after visiting Auschwitz or the former Romanian communist prison in Sighet. Originally published in Bucharest in 2009 by Polirom, the book has been translated into over twenty languages and it is a chronicle
I hadn’t come across books by Daniel Kehlmann until I picked up You Should Have Left; I was subsequently told that I shouldn’t have read this one first. Not having anything to compare Kehlmann’s writing with, I didn’t quite know what to expect; my naïve assumption at the outset was that it
Daniel Kehlmann specialises in parody and subversion and I make a beeline for everything of his that gets translated. 2017 has, therefore, been a good year, with two Kehlmanns brought to the British market. Firstly, the short novella (or should that be long short story?) You Should Have Left (transl
