Often, without much thought (and quite insensitively), we consider other cultures to be intrinsically different from our own; we imagine our communities as divided from each other by huge crevices that are difficult or simply impossible to bridge. And yet the bridging happens, sometimes even when we
A drawing pinned to the wall of 11-year-old Leila’s attic bedroom shows a tiny dark spot in the midst of a vast expanse of blue. The blue is the Mediterranean; the dark spot, the ramshackle craft in which she made the voyage to Europe with her mother and her two teenage brothers. Leila has also [&
Pascal Quignard is one of my favourite authors. But whenever I can get hold of a new book by him, I do not jump into it immediately – I put it away on a special shelf, to be savoured when I am in a suitable frame of mind and setting – so not in a […]
Poet Ana Blandiana is of that rare breed that has been laurelled with both literary and humanitarian singularity. Her career began with a poetry so charged with honesty that in the communist era it was banned, and she was paramount in the creation of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of t
There are three narratives in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Like a Falling Shadow: an account of James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King Jnr., as he escapes to Lisbon in 1968; an account of the unnamed narrator (nevertheless recognizably Molina) who visits Lisbon in 1986; and an account of th
In her native Germany, evening-class teacher Brigitte Glaser lived a quiet life, writing regional crime and culinary-themed fiction in her spare time – until, in 2016, her Black Forest-set novel Bühlerhöhe topped the national bestseller lists. And there’s not a poisoned gateau in sight. German
