dzpostcards: February 2016

2016/02/29

The Famished Road- Ben Okri

Novel

Short Review:

The Famished Road Is written by Nigerian author Ben Okri. The novel, published in 1991, follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed most likely Nigerian city. The novel employs a unique narrative style incorporating the spirit world with the "real" world in what some have classified as magical realism.

The God of Small Things- Arundhati Roy

Novel

Winner

1997

Short Review:

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel is a modern classic that has been read and loved worldwide. Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969.

Brooklyn Heights- Miral al-Tahawy

Novel

(Booker prize- Arabic Version)

Short Review:

Hind, newly arrived in New York with her eight-year-old son, several suitcases of unfinished manuscripts, and hardly any English,

Novel

Short Review:

For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians.

The Gift of Rain- Tan Twan Eng

Novel

Short Review:

Penang, 1939. Sixteen-year-old Philip Hutton is a loner. Half English, half Chinese and feeling neither, he discovers a sense of belonging in an unexpected friendship with Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat. Philip shows his new friend around his adored island of Penang,

Patrick Süskind - Perfume

The Story of a Murderer

Novel

Short Review

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind’s classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

Bone And Bread - Saleema Nawaz

Novel

Short Review:

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods -- and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle,

Anthony Doerr- All the Light We Cannot See

***

Short Review:

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Short Review

A bestseller in France and winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen

George Orwell- 1984

George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-Four

1984

Short Review:

1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever. 1984 presents a startling and haunting vision of the world,

Patrick Modiano- So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

Nobel Prize: 2014 .

Short Review:

In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman,

Heinrich Böll- And Never Said a Word

Novel

Short Review:

The novel deals with the thoughts and actions of Fred and Käte Bogner, a married couple. Fred, feeling sick of the poverty of their house,

Soul Mountain- Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian- Soul Mountain

Short Review:

In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death.But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer—he had won "a second reprieve from death.

Short Review:

When the newly qualified vet, James Herriot, arrives in the small Yorkshire village of Darrowby, he has no idea of the new friends he will meet or adventures that lie ahead. From the author whose books inspired the BBC series "All Creatures Great and Small",

Red Sorghum- Mo Yan

Novel

Nobel Prize

Short Review:

The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature Spanning three generations,

Yukio Mishima - Spring Snow

The Sea of Fertility, 1

Novel

Short Review:

Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow is the first novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here we meet Shigekuni Honda,

Alberto Moravia- Boredom

Alberto Moravia- Boredom

Or The Empty Canvas

Short Review

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society.

Yasunari Kawabata- The Old Capital

(Nobel Prize)

The Old Capital is one of the three novels cited specifically by the Nobel Committee when they awarded Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

Isabel Allende Llona - paula

One from: Latin American writers: Isabel Allende .

Short Review

When Isabel Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, the author began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. In the telling,

REVIEW

journey through the dark side of Japan's consumer-crazed society. Ordinary people plunge into insurmountable personal debt and fall prey to dangerous webs of underground creditors-so dangerous,

2016/02/29

2016/02/28

2016/02/27

2016/02/26

2016/02/25

2016/02/24

2016/02/23

2016/02/22

2016/02/21

2016/02/20

Yasunari Kawabata- The Old Capital

2016/02/19

2016/02/18

2016/02/16

2016/02/14

2016/02/11

2016/02/04

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