Perhaps the haughty young woman who hastily climbed aboard the rented carriage parked at Rocio Grande was named Berenice. She had just watched the first stage adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights and was coming out of the theatre with her husband, a military engineer overseeing the work on the Aqueduct. This information would...
My first introduction to Alberto Mussa’s writing was in 2008, when a mutual friend gave me a copy of his remarkable novel O enigma de Qaf (‘The Riddle of Qaf’) as a gift. I was immediately struck by the extraordinary literary quality; by the extensive research, imagination, and sensibility that had clearly informed the work;...
A latecomer slides into the middle row. “War Studies?” he asks the brunette next to him. She nods. I tell the students to put away their texts. “History isn’t in those books,” I say. “Where is it then?” the latecomer asks. A girl in the front runs a finger over her iPhone. “Bomb in Pakistan...
In his discursive and entertaining debut A Sense of Direction Gideon Lewis-Kraus challenges the boundaries of memoir and travelogue as he departs a life of lazy curiosity and stale hedonism in Berlin to embark on three distinct pilgrimages to examine how we may be defined by ritual, desire and purpose. Along the well-trodden trail of...
I live in Santa Cruz, California, on the very edge of the continent and one of the most beautiful places on planet earth. Most mornings I take a walk along West Cliff Drive, where I am joined by joggers, strollers, dogs, bicyclists and tourists. The ocean is below us; the path winds along the cliffs...
I’ll start with the early winter of 1996. I was lying in a hospital bed. I had been found after trying to kill myself by swallowing a lethal dose of sleeping pills with whiskey – an attempted suicide patient, they called me. When I opened my eyes, rain was falling outside the window. A few...
I’m late to meet Anna Whitwham, and as I rush into the appointed café, I spy a familiar-looking blonde woman tapping away at a laptop. We stare at each other. This must be Anna, I think. It’s actually Rachel Johnson who once wrote a book called Notting Hell, and Anna Whitwham is sat quietly behind...
Just like Rebecca Mead, I too first read George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a seventeen-year-old impatiently waiting for my life to begin in the small town in which I grew up. Unlike Mead, however, I struggled with the century-old study of provincial life. My resistance to the text exacerbated by the fact I was studying it...
Robert Glancy’s debut novel Terms & Conditions tells the story of a lawyer specialising in jargon-filled small print and footnotes no one ever reads, whose life unravels after an apparent road accident. He looks back with fond imagination on a book tour that turned out nothing like a car crash. 1 February The launch of...
Two poems from La Fontaine’s Selected Fables, relating that the natures of two-legged and four-legged creatures have a great deal in common. From a delightful new translation with an introduction and explanatory notes by Christopher Betts published by Oxford University Press, and illustrated throughout with Gustave Doré’s exquisite original engravings. The rat and the...
“Godfather, you’ll go blind from that, sir.” “What?” “You’re going to go blind. Reading is so sad. No sir, give me that book.” Caetaninha took the book out of his hands. Her godfather paced around and then went into his study, where there was no lack of books. He closed the door behind him and...
Another paper cut. Rebecca’s hands were a mess: swollen with tiny cuts, peppered with dry patches. She’d have to make sure they were all healed before Sean got home, or he would know what she’d been doing. She checked the clock. Almost six: she’d better get some dinner on. She pottered around the flat, checking...
