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A bit of relaxation reading this week, but this time, a very gripping novel set in Stalin’s Russia involving a personal audience with Stalin, a hunt for a great art treasure and a terrifying journey across the Russian/German front-line. I’ve only recently come across Sam Eastland although he has been writing for a very long [...] Anyone who has visited Germany will come away impressed by the similarities between our two countries. We Britons find much to admire in Germany but the Germans tend to admire British culture and our way of life also. When Philip Oltermann was 16, his parents told him that his father had accepted a posting to [...] If you want a bit of light relief from more serious books, then there are three out-of-copyright satirical novels available for free download which are about as funny as anything published today. In this post, I’m featuring Augustus Carp, Esq. which is a free download from various sites but I’ve linked to the Manybooks site [...] Saturn by Polish author Jacek Dehnel is a historical novel based on the life of Spanish artist Francisco Goya. The shocking cover illustration shows one of Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings” depicting Saturn devouring one of his sons. When Goya was in his seventies, he painted the Black Paintings directly onto the walls of his house [...] It is 70 years since Stefan Zweig committed suicide with his wife in Rio de Janeiro and while he died despairing of the future of Europe and it’s culture, the ongoing popularity of Zweig’s books suggests that perhaps the future was not as bleak as he supposed. This month, Pushkin Press are publishing four Zweig [...] The subdued art-work on the cover matches the plain title of this book, but first impressions in a book-shop can be safely ignored – Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar is a very inventive and unusual book, which I would place in my top two books read this year. The book opens in Trieste in September [...] Late last year I was entranced by Lynn Shepherd’s literary novel Tom All Alone’s in which private detective Charles Maddox took on a case involving among others, characters from Dickens’ Bleak House. I was delighted to discover that her new book A Treacherous Likeness is published this month and I made sure that I [...] When I started to read Byron Easy I quickly realised that it was going to be a challenge, not only because of it’s huge scale (500 word-packed pages), but also because I was going to spend all that time in the head of Byron Easy as he travelled by train from London heading to the [...] |
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