In category: Review

As many of you probably know, August is Women in Translation month, an initiative started and championed by Meytal Radzinski. In honour of this year’s Women in Translation month, here are my thoughts on the eight books I read in August. Ece Temelkuran, Women Who Blow on Knots, translated from Turkish by Alexander Dawe (Parthian […]

Translated from Arabic by Perween Richards (Comma Press, 2019) It’s fair to say that The Sea Cloak is one of my most anticipated books… ever. Comma Press first started advertising it last Spring: author Nayrouz Qarmout was to appear at the Edinburgh Literary Festival in August 2018, but her visa application was turned down twice […]

Translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth (Istros Books, 2019) Singer in the Night is the second novel by Croatian author Olja Savičević; the narrator tells us that it is “a story about life”, and encompassed within this is a story about love and memory, and their attendant joys and losses. Both hilarious and profound, this […]

Translated from the French (Belgium) by Faith Evans (Pushkin Press, 2019) A Nail, A Rose is a collection of short stories by Belgian writer Madeleine Bourdouxhe, written in the twentieth century but previously untranslated. Bourdouxhe was born in 1906 and lived through two world wars; she was admired by Simone de Beauvoir but has been […]

Translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Chris Andrews It’s new Charco book time, which is always something to get excited about: I have yet to read a dud book from Charco, and the newest release, The Wind That Lays Waste, is everything I’ve come to expect from them – original, evocative, memorable, and (quite simply) […]

Nordisk Books is an independent publishing house founded in the UK in 2016, with a focus on modern and contemporary Scandinavian literature. I was fortunate to read two of their recent releases, and am bringing them to you today in a special double-bill review. Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Zero, translated from Norwegian by Rosie Hedger (Nordisk […]

Translated from Galician by Craig Patterson In Home is like a different time, Galician writer Eva Moreda delves into the lived experience of emigrant communities in London in the 1960s and 70s. She writes from the perspective of Gelo, a recently widowed young(ish) man who has travelled from his home town of Veiga in Galicia […]

Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (Les Fugitives, 2019) Selfies is a thoughtful take on a modern obsession: in it, Sylvie Weil offers a series of vignettes inspired by self-portraits of women throughout history. Each snapshot describes a self-portrait that evokes for Weil a comparable tableau in her personal memory, which she describes before […]

Edited and with an introduction by Raph Cormack (Comma Press, 2019) This is the first of Comma Press’s “Reading the City” books I’ve read, and I was drawn to The Book of Cairo for primarily personal reasons: Egypt is my dad’s homeland, and its history the reason for my family’s enforced dispersal across the globe. […]

Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah (Oneworld, 2019) This year Oneworld Books have released four books by women in translation (see bottom of page for full details); I went to their Translated Fiction showcase at the British Library in April to hear Olga Grjasnowa and Selja Ahava talk about their newly […]