Beauty out of grief
I began writing The White Flower after the loss of my mother. I needed to find a language for what I was feeling and to create something new – and beautiful – from the pain of her absence. It was a way of keeping her memory alive and honouring the incredible lifeforce she possessed. Around...
Hector Bisi: Not just dandy
Writer and dandy Hector Bisi was born in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, and has donned several different hats since, working as an engineer, copywriter and modelling agent. He caused a bit of a stir some years ago with the publication of his debut novel Copacubana, which tells the tale of the owner of a...
Bad boys
Author’s note: What you’re about to read isn’t meant to be a positive or negative image or metaphor of Paris. Whether good or bad, beyond or besides all the clichés, and despite its possible arrogance, this book is meant to be Paris. One possible September Beau Patrick returned. Paris wasn’t there anymore. A year...
Travels around one’s father
Carlo and Renzo Piano’s Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty is an audaciously ambitious, unfailingly beguiling book. It is intimate and deliberately public all at once, vigorously peripatetic and languidly philosophical, a complex offspring of the tradition of ancient travelogues of ignorance and knowledge after the model of Herodotus, Pausanias, Ptolemy, Scylax and Hanno,...
Nicolasito
Tío Eliécer had owned the bluff until the seventies, when he divided it into four lots and put them up for sale. He had raised Damaris, because the man who got her mother pregnant – a soldier doing his military service in the region – abandoned her when she got knocked up, and in order...
Frances Cha: Face to face
Frances Cha’s bold and unsettling debut novel If I Had Your Face tells the story of four young women attempting to navigate present-day Seoul. Kyuri is a not-entirely-natural ‘room salon’ beauty whose yearning for a true relationship with a wealthy client threatens her work and status; Kyuri’s flatmate Miho is an orphan who won a...
Kyuri
My mother calls me hyo-nyeo – filial daughter – and strokes my hair with so much love it breaks my heart. But sometimes, she has spells when she shakes with anger towards me. “There is no greater sorrow than not getting married!” she says. “The thought of you alone in life, no children, that is...
Tishani Doshi: Shifting tides
There is nothing small about Tishani Doshi’s tightly wrought second novel Small Days and Nights – just as there is nothing small about India. Whether writing about its people, the scale of the challenges facing a country of epic unequal proportions, or simply describing the natural world on a wild strip of beach, Doshi...
Tishani Doshi: Saying it out loud
Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unflinching, tender, witty and wise collection of poems about danger, memory, beauty, time and tide, and transient but treasured joy. I catch up with her at the start of a marathon book tour that takes her from London and Newcastle to Ireland and Cornwall...
Petra Hůlová: Gender agendas
Multiple award-winning Czech novelist and playwright Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms takes the form of a foul-mouthed monologue by an unnamed prostitute in city very like Prague, who holds forth on matters regarding her profession, her punters and society at large. It is her second novel to be translated into English, the original Czech edition...
Apparitions
One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had...
