Welcome to February’s Riveting Reviews.
The line between fiction and fact seems very faint in our selection this month. We welcome a new reviewer to the team, Johanne Elster Hanson, who gives us a very personal take on Berge, Jan Kjærstad’s fictional response to the 2011 attacks on Utøya.
One of our old hands, Jennifer Sarha, reviews The Girl with the Leica, Helena Janeczek’s fictionalisation of the life of Gerda Taro, while another, Aneesa Higgins raves about Ismael Kadare’s deeply autobiographical novel The Doll.
Aneesa is the translator of A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, which ELNet Assistant Editor Alyson Coombes reviews this month. I take on a tome of great significance: Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per – a novel from 1905, but populated with real historical characters.
Barry Forshaw returns with the latest books from Simone Buchholz, the Queen of German Krimi, and from the Swedish duo know as Lars Kepler, while Max Easterman has his view of Provence changed by the first adult novel by a writer for young adults, Marion Brunet.
Anna Blasiak and Lizzy Siddal take on short-story collections that both reflect the times we live in: although Anna’s pick – Pixel by Krisztina Tóth – turns out to be a novel with chapters that can be read as short stories.
Enjoy these reviews – as always contributed for free by passionate and articulate lovers of international literature. And please check out our EBRD Literature Prize 2020 Longlist special reviews – from the judges of the prize.
We’ll be back at the end of next month.
By West Camel
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