HOTEL BOSPHORUS
Esmahan Aykol
Translated from the Turkish by Ruth Whitehouse
Kati Hirschel is a young German bookseller who loves living in Istanbul and running a shop that specializes in mysteries and crime novels. She enjoys spending time with her Turkish friends, and her life …
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Reviewed by Maggie Oldendorf
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ADIOS, HAPPY HOMELAND!
Ana Menéndez
How does one escape? From what one does one need to escape? Why? Ana Menéndez's new collection of interlinked tales is all about escape artists, starting with the author herself. Each tale is attributed to a concocted author, for whom Menéndez has supplied an appropriately imaginative biographical note, including one for herself: "Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance."
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Reviewed by Jane A. Jones
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SUN DOG
Monica Roffey
Glorious colours riotously abound in Monique Roffey's first novel: 'deep purples, maroons, reds and oranges'. It is set in a delicatessen cum cafe in Shepherd's Bush, London where large, ungainly August Chalmin presides over culinary riches.
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Reviewed by Chris Mills
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WIDOW: STORIES
Michelle Latiolais
Michelle Latiolais has a rapacious love of words. She plays with them, rolls them around in her mouth, ruminates on their meanings and their origins, reads them backwards even, and links them to other words, constantly coming to different insights and enjoyment of the language.
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Reviewed by Akeela Gaibie Dawood
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DANIEL STEIN, INTERPRETER
Ludmila Ulitskaya
Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait
Oswald Rufeisen might be called a saint; he lived a simple, selfless life, full of kindness and sacrifice. Truth is often greater than fiction, yet Ludmila Ulitskaya succeeds in fictionalising the life of Oswald Rufeisen as 'Daniel Stein' or Brother Daniel. She weaves a fascinating web of activity around Brother Daniel's life from his early life in Poland; through the years of the Second World War when he works for the Gestapo as an interpreter, yet saves many people from the Nazi death camps; to his years as a Jewish Catholic priest in Israel.
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Reviewed by Ceri Evans
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NOMAD: A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In Nomad, the 2010 follow up to her earlier memoir Infidel, human rights activist Hirsi Ali gives a brief update on her life since moving to the United States. Through telling her highly personal story, she develops her philosophy and discusses the efforts to ensure that "women everywhere, of all cultures, merit access to education and basic human rights."
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Reviewed by Joyce Nickel
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THE SKIN OF THE SKY
Elena Poniatowska
Translated from the Spanish by Deanna Heikennen
The Skin of the Sky follows the life of Lorenzo de Tena, one of Mexico's most celebrated astronomers. His childhood bond with his doting mother is shattered by her early death, leaving him to be raised by an apathetic father. His mother's …
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Reviewed by Andy Barnes
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THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR
Allegra Goodman
The Cookbook Collector is one of those instantly engaging books that makes you want to tell all your friends that they must read it even when you are only half way through the novel yourself. Author Allegra Goodman did herself a disservice when she described her new novel as "Sense and Sensibility for the digital age", particularly given the number of outraged responses that subsequently appeared on Jane Austen fan pages. Goodman deals with much bigger issues than Jane Austen ever aspired to write about in her novels, however exquisite those classics might be.
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Reviewed by Dorothy Dudek Vinicombe
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THE HUT OF FALLEN PERSIMMONS
Adriana Lisboa
Translated from the Portuguese by Sarah Green
It is interesting to read a book that you are certain will be a love story—though you aren't sure whether happy or ill-fated, requited or unrequited—only to find yourself perpetually poised, waiting for that romance to start. Haruki, an illustrator of books, and Celina, an embroidery artist, meet by chance on a subway in Rio de Janeiro.
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Reviewed by Tad Deffler
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SMUGGLED
Christina Shea
This is a story about getting lost and being found. It begins in the perfect time and place for a tale of identity stolen, transformed and rediscovered: 1943, in the midst of the Holocaust. You might think you can imagine what comes next, but that's unlikely. The story is surprising yet realistic, one that has not been told often enough. What happened to the Holocaust survivors who ended up trapped behind the Iron Curtain…
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Reviewed by Kathleen Ambrogi
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REDEMPTION IN INDIGO
Karen Lord
Barbadian author Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo is based on a Senegalese folk tale which opens in the village of Makendha. Paama, an ordinary and good hearted woman whose cooking skills are revered throughout the region, has moved back home two years previously to live with her parents after leaving her husband Ansige, a gluttonous and arrogant man-child whose incessant demands became too much for his wife to satisfy.
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Reviewed by Darryl Morris
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THIS TOO SHALL PASS
S. J. Finn
I inhale. Realign my chair, which slides a little too easily under me. I do have one niggling concern (there are several but this is the one that comes to mind): while I will go on feeling as transparent as air, what I'm about to put in writing will show itself in a dense hue, one that might even shock me. —With these thoughts we are introduced to Jen, now known as Monty, who goes on to simply and honestly recount the changes that have occurred in her life.
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Reviewed by Judy Lim
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PENWOMAN
Elin Wagner
Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death
A runaway bestseller when it was published in Sweden in 1910, and now a classic, Elin Wagner's Penwoman was "the book of the Swedish women's suffrage movement" according to translator Sarah Death. Now 100 years old, Penwoman remains a captivating story that convincingly transports the reader back to the beginning of the twentieth century, but also reaches ahead to the twenty-first and speaks to the gender inequality that still exists.
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Reviewed by Jana Herlander
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MY SISTER CHAOS
Lara Fergus
This fine novel grows out of the tension between order and chaos. Civil war brings chaos to previously orderly lands, and maps bring order and a finite structure to an endlessly disordered world. Yet seeking perfect order in life can itself bring a sort of chaos. These tensions play out in the lives of two sisters, refugees from a country destroyed by war.
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Reviewed by Michael W. Matthew
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HEATWAVE AND CRAZY BIRDS
Gavriela Avigur-Rolem
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
Heatwave and Crazy Birds is a dense and complex, but ultimately rewarding book about one woman's search for 'her' Israel. Rich with historical references but rooted firmly in the present, it is a bittersweet examination of the Israeli people's relationship with the land they live on and the problems it faces.
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Reviewed by Andy Barnes
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THIS WILL GO DOWN ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD
Susannah Felts
This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record defies categorisation; it is not merely a coming of age story, but neither is it a sugary high school drama nor a moralistic critique of the potential pitfalls of teenage life. This debut novel focuses on the importance of friendship and the lessons learned as you grow up—sometimes surprising lessons—about what real friendship means.
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Reviewed by Ceri Evans
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