Even on holiday, I’m juggling books as so many readers do. In an effort to envigorate my French, I’ve been reading Gwenaëlle Aubry’s moving Personne, a meditation, after her father’s death, on his lifelong struggle…
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You know I struggle to keep up my reading record at the best of times, but it’s even tougher to do so on holiday. Still, before titles are lost to the mists of bad memory,…
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Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is not only super sad but also both frightening and funny. It occurs in the very near future (“oh, let’s say next Tuesday,” the flyleaf suggests) when our portagonist,…
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If you’ve read Ross King’s wonderful The Judgement of Paris (about the Impressionist painters), you’ll know how compellingly he puts together research to tell the story of a period of art history. In Defiant Spirits: The…
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I will admit that I resisted picking up this book for some time, despite reading numerous laudatory reviews, because of its subject matter. In case you haven’t come across these reviews of the Booker-shortlisted novel,…
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