This is a bittersweet winter’s tale of love, hope and despair, and rather like Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Match Girl, referenced by its sympathetic young he
Darkenbloom, a fictional Austrian border town true to its Gothic name, has the timbre of a fable or a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. A story in which nothing is as it first seem
This is a glorious book centred on two Russian-speaking families in Ukraine during the Soviet era. At its heart is the complex love-hate relationships between mothers and daughters
Christoph Ransmayr may be a much-garlanded author across the German-speaking world, but his profile in the UK is not nearly as high as it should be given his gifts as a storyteller
It’s always dangerous for a writer to echo George Orwell; few can hope to equal the lucidity and power of Orwell’s prose, and Alberto Prunetti doesn’t. But his story of setti
My own stay at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, on the Charcot ward for neurological disease, was thankfully rather less eventful than the fictional events set in that same loc
It was late in the day but still early in the genocide of August 2014 as the sun began to set over the horizon in northern Iraq. The BBC cameraman Duncan Stone and I were standing
The year is 1945 and Berlin – the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich – is a city eviscerated by war. ‘The stumps of their mutilated buildings rise naked and ugly among the he
You, like me, may never have heard of Ostap Vyshnia. That’s the pseudonym of a Ukrainian writer and satirist who was very popular in Ukraine in the 1920s … words to make any re
