The first time I have come across a book written originally in Catalan, this is a classic that deserves to be much better known. Natalia is a young woman from Barcelona who enjoys her job at a bakery but gives it up to marry Quimet shortly before the outbreak of the...
"I didn't like my own secrets. I liked other people's even less." Writen in 1987, this novel charting the relationship between a successful writer and her housekeeper, Emerence, perhaps draws many parallels with Szabó's own life, after her rehabilitation by the...
After her husband's death, Effie finds herself uprooted from her home and her previous existence, with barely any say in the matter, in order to live with her daughter Iza in Iza's modern apartment in Budapest. Overwhelmed by grief and bewildered by the move to a...
Perhaps, like me, at the start of the pandemic in 2020, you found yourself wondering if this was it? Might civil society as we know it be about to disintegrate? How would communities cope, would selfishness or cooperation prevail? These themes and much more are...
Set in Chile and goldrush California during the middle years of the nineteenth century, this magnificent romance tells the story of English foundling Eliza Sommers, a spirited, sparky and ambitious romantic who becomes embroiled in a forbidden love affair with the...
"One who reads is worth two who don't." Our Riches celebrates the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who in 1935, at the age of twenty, founded Les Vraies Richesses, an iconic Algerian bookstore/printing press/library. Charlot, famous for discovering...
The first in the famous Neapolitan quartet of novels, in My Brilliant Friend we meet Elena and Lila for the first time as they navigate the beginning of their lifelong friendship, the poverty of 1950s Naples, and the inexplicable behaviour of adults. A literary...
"That afternoon the little beach seemed to be on fire. There was a whiplash of light in the air, or maybe it was inside us. Who knows? Our legs were still wet from the sea. Sand glinted down the length of Borja's ankles like tiny slivers of tin. The man was face down,...
Together with her partner, the Hungarian Endre Friedmann, Gerda Taro was one half of the alias Robert Capa, widely considered to be the twentieth century's greatest war and political photographer. Taro was killed while documenting the Spanish Civil War and tragically...
Written in the nineties, this book's matter of fact approach to difficult moral issues will still not appeal to all, perhaps even more so now in the era of #MeToo, but the characters of Sui and Kazami especially are compelling, and the writing has a meditative quality...