The title of Faruk Šehić’s novel is a reference to the Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Like the Sholokhov, Šehić’s book is about fratricid
Life is full of choices, death not quite as much. Even if you believe the soul travels on after the body is left behind, its destination has been determined by choices you made whi
As soon as I started leafing through and reading Stigmata, the poetry collection by Gëzim Hajdari, who has been living in exile in Italy since 1992, I was intrigued. What is it ab
I wish more people would talk about Christine Dwyer Hickey, after all the Irish novelist and short-story writer has her name on nine books. In the newest of these, the novel, The L
Right at the outset a full critical bias disclosure is in order: when this book landed on my desk my spur-of-the-moment reaction was negative, not least because Daniel Pennac’s c
With all my literary travels over the course of the past month, crossing the globe in the search for the pick of the Man Booker International Prize crop, I could be forgiven for wa
Dutch non-fiction tends not to be about the Netherlands. Many non-fiction authors write on subjects that are played out far from our borders, or else the books are so universal in
