Black Rock White City by A.S. Patrić

October 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Transit Lounge, 2015. 157 pgs. Purchased. Yugoslavian refugees, Jovan and Suzan Brakochevich, resettled in the suburbs of Melbourne after their two young children died in a UN refugee camp during the Balkan War. Both husband and wife blame each other – Suzan didn’t eat the poisoned food so perhaps she knew; Jovan didn’t leave Sarajevo when Suzan wanted them to – and themselves for the death of their children, leaving their marriage on shaky ground as […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Balkans, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Oceania • Tags: A.S. Patrić

The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

September 30, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2017. Originally published 1931. 326 pgs. Purchased.  For the past two decades, the Stevens family has taken a two-week holiday in Bognor Regis on the southern coast of England. The family has their routine down; tasks and chores are handed out the night before in order to make sure they can leave their home at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich in time to catch the train via Clapham Junction to their holiday destination. Upon arrival, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: R.C. Sherriff

The Time In Between by María Dueñas

September 27, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn. Atria Books, 2011. Originally published 2009. 626 pgs. Purchased.  After following her lover from Spain to Morocco, Sira Quiroga is suddenly left abandoned and penniless in the Protectorate at the start of the Spanish civil war. The illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man, Sira is accused by her half-brother of robbing their father and faces prosecution should she secure the funds to return home. Using her wits and her […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Book Club, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Spain, Spanish, Translated • Tags: Daniel Hahn, María Dueñas

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano

September 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Peirene Press, 2019. 128 pgs. The short stories included in this collection are connected through its shared characters, the shared setting of rural France, and the shared themes of dispossession, hitchhiking, and suicide. Some of these shared connections are stronger than others; there was, for example, little about the setting that stood out as distinctly French to me. If I had not read about the setting in […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, French, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins, Sophie Lewis

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

August 21, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Riverhead Books, 2009. Originally published 1998. 480 pgs. Purchased. In the afterward to my Kindle edition, Waters sums up the plot of her novel in the most perfect way possible: “…oh dear, how lurid it sounded, how improbable, above all how niche — the tale of a Victorian oyster girl [named Nancy] who loses her heart to a male impersonator, becomes her partner in bed and on the music-hall stage, and then, cruelly abandoned, has a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom • Tags: Sarah Waters

The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch

August 7, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2016. Originally published 1910. 121 pgs. Purchased. Amid the political upheaval of the beginning of the twenty century in Russia, the governor of the state university in St. Petersburg shutters the university’s doors and decamps to his summer residence with his family. There, a letter arrives in the post, promising to kill the governor is he fails to take the “right” side by reopening the university. Concerned for […]

Categories: 20BooksofSummer, Crime, Europe, Fiction, German, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Jamie Bulloch, Ricarda Huch

Circe by Madeline Miller

August 5, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 393 pgs. Purchased. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Circe is a witch living on a remote island who changes Odysseus’ men into pigs. In Miller’s retelling, we are introduced to the complicated backstory to this seemingly minor character, the daughter of the sun god Helois who is perceived as a threat to the fragile dominion of Olympus over Titan. Banished to the island by Zeus, Circe must confront the unintended consequences of her […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction • Tags: Madeline Miller

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

July 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Neil Shah. Audible, 2015. Originally published 2014. 13 hours, 18 minutes. Purchased. In 1527, the Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port city of Sanlúcar de Barramedawith 450 troops, officers, and slaves and another 150 sailors, wives, and servants to the newly discovered island of La Florida (present-day Florida, which is obviously not an island). His goal was to claim La Florida for the Spanish crown and find Apalacha, a city rumored to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Africa, Audiobook, Europe, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Laila Lalami

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

July 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Adjoa Andoh. Recorded Books, 2014. Originally published 2013. 17 hours, 29 minutes. Purchased. Fifteen years after leaving Nigeria to study in America, Ifemelu has decided to return home to Lagos. Everyone – her parents, her friends, even her hair braider in Trenton, New Jersey – think she is crazy to return after securing the necessary immigration papers to live in the United States indefinitely. Yet, Ifemelu has grown tired of navigating the fault lines within […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Africa, Audiobook, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Nigeria, North America, ReadDiverse, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Adjoa Andoh, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

July 17, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1945. 377 pgs. Purchased.  In 1939, the four Wiltshire children enjoy an idyllic summer holiday with their parents, a middle-class couple from central London. Their holiday – and, in fact, their comfortable lives – ends with the children being informed that the two oldest, Laurel and Tony, will be sent to boarding school while the two younger children, Kim and Tuesday, will be sent with Nannie to live with their paternal grandparents. […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Noel Streatfeild

You Would Have Missed Me by Birgit Vanderbeke

July 15, 2019 by Christina

Print – fiction. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2019. Originally published 2016. 154 pgs. Purchased. The early 1960s, a young girl arrives in West Germany from East Germany with her parents. The family is settled into a camp for displaced people where the little girl befriends a family unit consisting of a woman and two men, who instruct the little girl to refer to them as her aunt and uncles. Her parents attempt to sever this […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, German, Germany, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

Assumed Obligation by Kara Louise

July 12, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Lulu.com, 2008. Originally published 2007. 244 pgs. Received from PaperBackSwap. In this sequel to Assumed Engagement, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are headed to Paris with plans to dedicate a portion of their honeymoon to visiting and learning about a school for the deaf. A tenant of Darcy’s has adopted a deaf child, and both Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam are eager to set up a similar school at Pemberley to aid their tenant and others in Derbyshire. Meanwhile, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Austen Inspired, Europe, Fiction, France, United Kingdom • Tags: Kara Louise