As followers of this blog will know, my hero is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the author of the landmark travel memoir An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, which was my Togolese choice for my 2012 project to read a book from every country. After the book was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021, Kpomassie and I became friends. In the final chapter of my new book, Relearning to Read, I write that I hope I will one day travel to Greenland with him.
This summer, I got to do just that, spending two weeks travelling along the west coast of the world’s largest island, stopping at many of the places Kpomassie first visited sixty years ago, courtesy of the expedition cruise company Aurora Expeditions (known as AE Expeditions in the UK).
It was the trip of a lifetime and a huge privilege to experience such an extraordinary place in such exceptional company. In addition to countless illuminating discussions about Kpomassie’s inspirations, and views on everything from writing and family to travel and alcohol, I got to meet some of his friends, including a woman who was four years old when Kpomassie first visited Greenland in 1965 and stayed with her family.
This weekend, the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper published my account of our adventure in their Travel supplement, giving it the honour of making it the cover story. You can find the online version here. I hope it will be the first of several kinds of storytelling that come out of this amazing adventure.
Many of those I interact with about books through this project, both virtually and at my Incomprehension Workshops, are young people. Even now, all these years after I set out to read the world, I sometimes find my inbox flooded with messages from students whose teacher has asked them to write to me recommending a story. A while ago, I received a wonderful video from a young boy in Beijing advising me to read a book that explained why tomatoes can sometimes be quite dangerous.
So it was a delight to be invited to contribute an essay to a new collection celebrating the importance and joy of reading for children and young people. The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation is the second such anthology put together by editor Jennie Orchard. Like the first volume, The Gifts of Reading, it was inspired by an essay by the UK nature writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the foreword to this new collection.
Other contributors include such household names as William Boyd, Michael Morpurgo, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Imtiaz Dharker and Horatio Clare, and all royalties go to Room to Read and U-Go. Founded by John Wood, these organisations promote literacy and education for girls and women. Indeed, U-Go’s aim is to fund the university education of 100,000 young women in the world’s lowest income countries.
We celebrated the UK publication of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation with a launch at London’s Daunt Bookshop. Also published in the US and Australia, the collection is widely available.
BUT I have one copy that I am happy to sign and send anywhere in the world. If you’d like it, simply message me or leave a comment below telling me about a book you gave or received that was important to you.
I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in the dust.
In the international-literature arena, some of the names that spring to mind include Marina Sofia, Stu Allen and Tony Malone. These bloggers and others like them maintain an astonishing pace, easily equally my efforts in 2012 in many cases. And they’ve been going for years, bringing attention to thousands of titles that deserve to be better known by readers of the world’s most published language.
Within the anglophone literature sphere, there is a whole raft of other, equally industrious reader/reviewers. I knew little about them until my publisher, Renard Press, organised a blog tour for my novel Crossing Over two years ago. For a month leading up to the release of the book, I had the initially daunting but ultimately lovely experience of seeing my story thoughtfully and generously reviewed by a different book blogger each day. It helped build buzz around the book and, at what can often be an oddly lonely and unsettling time for an author, allowed me to enjoy seeing my work going out into the world.
I was so impressed by the blog tour that I wrote an article about it for The Author, the member’s magazine of the UK’s Society of Authors. As part of my research for this, I interviewed former English teacher Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag. I was amazed by what she told me: the volume of books she features is such that she operates a traffic light and scoring system to help her keep track of them, and she schedules her posts many months in advance. It sounds like a full-time job, except that, of course, for Linda and most other bloggers like her, it is unpaid: the only material reward they get for the hours and hours they spend reading, planning and reviewing are free advance copies.
Because blog tours are less of a thing when it comes to international literature, and because I only rarely feature brand-new books (preferring to promote older titles that deserve a second look) and only do one review a month, I have never taken part in a blog tour.
This month, however, I am making an exception for a title that is close to my heart. Where Snowbirds Play, Gina Goldhammer’s debut novel (published by Renard Press’s imprint Hay Press on 6 May 2025), takes us into the privileged world of 1990s Palm Beach, where British graduate Philip has just secured a placement at a new marine life institute. But all is not what it seems both among the super rich who fund him and in Philip’s own story. Soon, secrets, rivalries and financial scandals are bubbling to the surface, and as hurricane season looms it seems unlikely that everyone will escape unscathed.
I love this book for two reasons. Firstly, I love it because I’ve had the privilege of seeing it develop over several years in my capacity as a mentor/editor to its author. Working with a writer and seeing their ideas fill and rise until they find their fullest expression is an extraordinary process, and one that I’ve had the joy of experiencing a number of times since I was published, most frequently as a mentor for the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.
But I particularly love this book because it is so singular and true to itself. Only Goldhammer could have written it. As I say in the supporting blurb I gave for the book, the novel offers an arresting perspective on a lifestyle few experience firsthand. Taking readers into the heart of privilege, Goldhammer spins a compelling story that lays bare the tensions, frailties, desires and self-deceptions that drive human beings everywhere. Sumptuous, witty and surprising, this novel will transport you to a world that is at once absorbingly fresh, and a charming – and alarming – reflection of our own.
And I’m delighted to see that other readers are already recognising the book’s uniqueness. On one of the earlier stops in the Where Snowbirds Play blog tour, bobsandbooks wrote that they were ‘left feeling like this was something a little bit different’. I couldn’t agree more.
Where Snowbirds Play by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press, 6 May 2025)
Not only that, but the event took place in Assam, north-east India, at one of the liveliest and most inspiring gatherings of writers it has ever been my privilege to attend.
This was my second visit to Dibrugarh. The first took place in March 2024, when I was one of the cohort of writers from around the world invited to take part in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. That event was such a success that the university committed to host a further two editions of the festival. The first of these took place last week.
This time, my involvement in the festival was bigger. Not only was I present as a speaker, but I played a small role in suggesting and inviting some of the other authors in the months leading up to the event. As such, I had the joy of seeing a number of writers whose work I have long admired take the stage in Dibrugarh. They included the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren, who I met when our debut books came out in 2015; Northern Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, who I’ve known since we were aspiring authors in our teens; and Uzbek novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for my first book, Reading the World.
In addition, the festival brought a number of other intriguing writers onto my radar. With a focus on Africa, the programme included Cameroonian novelist Ernis, Congolese-Norwegian poet and novelist Raïs Neza Boneza and award-winner Joaquim Arena from Cabo Verde.
I chaired several panels with South African writer Shubnum Khan. Her work has only recently become available in the UK, in the form of her engrossing second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, but I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read her essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo in preparation for our discussion. Funny and illuminating, the book sheds light on the challenges of moving through the world as a Muslim woman. It would appeal to fans of Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black and ought to be more widely available. UK and US publishers, I’m looking at you.
Having one or two authors from around 20 nations present, alongside a host of wonderful Indian writers, made for an unusually level playing field when it came to discussing international issues. It was powerful to hear perspectives on questions such as the legacy of colonialism and the realities of migration from such a wide range of people and places. I think all of us had our eyes opened over the course of the festival.
The fact that these conversations were so inspiring and frank was also down to the ambience the university and the festival team created. The welcome in Assam is always warm, but this time the organisers went the extra mile. From the student volunteers who showed us around and the banners with author photos lining the campus roads to the delicious food and the world-class Dibrugarh University folk orchestra that played at the closing ceremony, the guests felt celebrated at every turn.
The same held true outside the university. When a group of us ventured out into town, bookshop owner Pradyut Hazarika invited us all for chai. The shop was one of eight branches of Banalata employing 200 staff across Assam, he explained, and the business not only sells but also publishes the Assamese titles it displays. This makes for a personal touch that is often missing in the book industry in other parts of the world.
The personal touch is also at the heart of DUILF. ‘Having established contact with you, you are now close to us in more ways than one and we shall make every effort to make you feel at home,’ wrote curator Rahul Jain in his welcome note to authors.
As we all left Dibrugarh to return to our lives around the world, dispersed like seeds from a pod as Lucy Caldwell put it, I for one certainly felt I was leaving a home from home.
This novel was a recommendation from leading English-Danish translator Signe Lyng. After we met at the Dublin Book Festival in November, she generously sent me a list of recent Danish-language novels that she admires, including Niviaq Korneliussen’s Last Night in Nuuk and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.
One of Lyng’s suggestions stood out to me for two reasons: firstly, because it came out twelve years ago and so the English-language version was likely to fit my criteria of only featuring books published pre-2021 on this blog this year. Secondly, because Greenland is a big focus of the plot, and as anyone who knows about my admiration for the Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie will realise, Greenland is a place that particularly captures my imagination. (Indeed, 2025 promises to bring some exciting news on that front – watch this space!)
Kim Leine’s award-winning and bestselling The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, translated by Martin Aitken, tells the story of Morten Falch, an eighteenth-century Danish missionary who travels to Greenland to spread the gospel to the Inuit. Ambitious and earnest, yet riddled with doubts and secret desires (and fixated on Rousseau’s observation that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’), Falch finds himself tested in the colony’s harsh physical and social climate. Principles crumble in the face of insurmountable inequalities, corruption and human frailty, with gut-wrenching results.
This is a truly absorbing novel. One of those rare fat books you wish was even longer. The writing is at heart of this. There is a wonderful dexterity to Leine and Aitken’s prose, which takes us inside Morten’s most intimate thoughts (as well as those of a number of characters he encounters), laying bare his blind spots, idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities and desires.
Part of the work’s power comes from the attention to detail and physical sensations. The writing excels at delineating the minute shifts in power dynamics that accompany crucial moments and decisions, showing how easily things might turn in another direction, and yet simultaneously making us feel the inevitability of what transpires.
The most powerful example of this involves a protracted rape scene, which shows the ebb and flow of control, and captures the absurdity, humanity and even wrongheaded moments of tenderness, humour and connection in the midst of the cruelty and brutality being inflicted. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it feels,’ the attacker tells their victim at one point, revealing the self-deception underlying all the worst suffering depicted in the book. Leine presents a powerful anatomy of objectification, showing the way skewed power dynamics warp thinking, feeding off our struggle to conceive of others as having interior lives that are as rich and nuanced as our own.
Interestingly, the book starts with a brief translator’s note, explaining that using the third person pronoun to address someone was a feature of polite discourse in eighteenth-century Danish and that Aitken has chosen to retain it in the English version. This feels like a risky decision – distancing and potentially confusing. Yet Aitken makes it work, establishing a new variant of formal speech that quickly feels natural to the world of the novel. This and the numerous virtuosic descriptions and assertions often couched in deceptively simple terms are testament to the skill of this writer-translator pair.
Take my favourite line, used to describe an infested mattress on the ship on which Morten sails: ‘The lice seep forth like water.’ How horrifyingly marvellous is that? It captures the action so simply and so precisely. You can see the lice rising out of the fibres. It is absolutely the right formulation to bring that moment to life. And if I sat at my desk for half a year it would never occur to me.
And of course it is in this ingenuity, this care, this attention to detail, that the hope of this majestic novel lies. Because although he depicts characters enchained by their own perspectives and desires, Leine reveals by the world he creates for us that we can transcend our small, partial viewpoints. We can look further, we can feel beyond the boundaries of our own experience. The best storytelling allows us to to do this. And it is by making this possible that books like The Prophets of Eternal Fjord live beyond their moment.
And so I come to the end of my year of reading nothing new for this blog. What have I learnt? Well, although my other writing projects and work chairing events at literature festivals mean I haven’t been able only to read books published pre-2021, turning down the volume on the hype around newly published works over the past twelve months has proved instructive.
There are many books that make a big splash when they appear and there are others that echo more loudly with the passing of the years. Sometimes there is a correlation between the two, as with The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. But often books that are big when they come out fall away in time: many of the literary stars of previous eras are barely remembered now.
While big publishers have a fair bit of influence over which titles are visible at first, it is readers who dictate what will be remembered and what will speak beyond its moment. It is the books that stay with us, that we continue to recommend and return to that will live on.
This is exciting and encouraging. It means we all have a say in shaping our literary culture. And it means that small presses that don’t have the marketing fire power of the big houses may still produce work that finds a large audience and reverberates down the years.
Thanks to everyone who has shared their suggestions of older books that stay with them this year. Here’s to many more wonderful literary encounters (and a possible trip to Greenland) in 2025!
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Atlantic Books, 2016)
Last weekend, I had the privilege of being part of the line-up at Dublin Book Festival, an annual celebration of all things literary in Ireland’s capital. My event was a discussion of reading the world with Literature Ireland director Sinéad Mac Aodha (pictured with me above), who helped launch Crossing Over at Hodges Figgis last year. But I was lucky to attend several other things thanks to the Literature Ireland team, who took me under their wing for the weekend.
I don’t consider myself a horror fan, but I was intrigued by what editor Jack Fennell said in his speech about how horror is a way of articulating the sense that something is wrong in the world and helping people to feel less alone in this. My fiction bears hallmarks of this, so I am intrigued to see how this plays out in the collection.
I was also deeply impressed by the ethos of the collection’s publisher, Tramp Press, one of a number of indie houses making strides in Ireland. Their submission window is open now, so if you live outside North America and are looking for somewhere to place work, I would recommend checking them out.
The next day I attended an event on short stories with Jan Carson and Mary Costello (pictured above). In the queue outside I was delighted to bump into debut novelist Alan Murrin, with whom I did an event earlier this year. His recommendation of Mary Costello’s story ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ was so enthusiastic that I lost no time in buying a copy of her latest collection.
The discussion in the event was illuminating and wide-ranging. Jan Carson talked about how word counts were coming down for many journals and competitions. ‘Watch yourself if you’re always writing to fit others’ requirements,’ she said. She explained that the way into stories for her is through concepts, and gave a brilliant example in the shape a story in her latest collection that was commissioned to explore how Northern Ireland is seen in the wake of Brexit. She had approached the subject by envisaging a baby drifting down a river separating the land of two farmer brothers who don’t get on.
Meanwhile, Mary Costello said that for her the spur to writing comes from thinking about the interior lives of her characters. It will often be physical exercise, whether walking or hoovering, that shakes problems loose in her work.
Next up was an event on the essay, chaired by Brendan Barrington, founder editor of The Dublin Review. I found this very inspiring. Over the hour-long discussion, in which panellists shared some of their favourite pieces from the publication, I was struck by the enthusiasm of these writers for this somewhat enigmatic form, and by their openness to people writing in several genres. ‘If you’re a serious writer and you don’t write an essay occasionally, you’re missing a trick,’ said Barrington at one point. I took this as a challenge. Watch this space.
My event was towards the end of the afternoon and it was wonderful to be greeted by an enthusiastic audience, featuring several familiar faces, among them author Rónán Hession, Africa Institute in Ireland programme director Adekunle Gomez and Lyndsey Fineran, who created my literary explorer role at Cheltenham Literature Festival and is now artistic director of the Auckland Writers Festival.
The discussions afterwards were particularly heartwarming. So many readers shared insights about how reading internationally connected to their experience, and I left with a list of book recommendations. I was also particularly delighted to make the acquaintance of translator Signe Lyng, who brings many of Ireland’s most well-known writers’ work into Danish. She subsequently sent me a list of Danish recommendations. I think I feel a book of the month coming on…
I left Dublin inspired and encouraged. What I’d shared in was an event founded on the belief that storytelling is valuable, not for the money it makes but because of the connections it forges – something that I hope also drives my work.
Irish writing has always had an important place on the international stage, and is perhaps enjoying a particularly powerful moment. At Dublin Book Festival, it was not hard to see why.
A few weeks ago, I found myself having lunch next to the Belgian author David Van Reybrouck. We were in the writers’ room at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he had just taken part in a panel discussion on the end of empire, drawing on his Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted book Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, translated by David Colmer and David McKay.
When I explained my role as the festival’s literary explorer in residence and how it had come out of this project and my first book, Reading the World, he exclaimed: ‘I just had that book in my hand!’ It turned out he had picked it up in the festival’s bookshop and checked the list at the back to see what I had chosen for Belgium. ‘You picked a French-language writer I’ve never heard of!’ he said with a mischievous smile.
More than twelve years after I set out to read the world, it was clearly high time I ventured into Flemish literature. So I asked what he would recommend.
According to Van Reybrouck and to the blurb on the back of my 1991 Penguin edition, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium (first published in 1983) is one of its homeland’s most important novels. Set in Flanders between 1939 and 1947, it follows the coming of age of Louis Seynaeve, whose family collaborates with the Germans during the Occupation. Through the unfolding of tortured domestic relationships, it reveals the national and cultural cost of betrayal, brutality and war.
It’s easy to see why The Sorrow of Belgium appeals to Van Reybrouck, whose Revolusi I was listening to while I read this novel. Both books find ingenious ways to pleat together the personal and the political: while Revolusi interweaves extraordinary eyewitness testimony with wide-ranging historical analysis, The Sorrow of Belgium uses intimate, personal details to reveal the psychological cost of occupation and domination. As Louis obsesses over his father’s secret stash of toffees, navigates a series of disturbing early sexual encounters and steers his way through fraught relationships with the nuns and priests in charge of his education, we see the isolation and insecurity that the horrors unfolding largely offstage have wrought in him.
The book captures the tedium and pettiness that can characterise the everyday experience of momentous historical events (as many of us may have found during the pandemic). ‘The only thing you went through [during the Occupation] was making sure you got enough food and clothes and coal,’ Louis tells his mother. This both is and isn’t true: we see all the characters shaped and changed by international events. Although their reality may be measured out in the availability of provisions and snippets of local gossip, the pressure they are under is always evident, coming out in surprising, disturbing and sometimes amusing ways.
Language and storytelling are constant themes. Louis’s father rails against French speakers, while, at the start of the novel, Louis and his boarding school chums make the sharing of so-called ‘banned books’ a condition for admittance into their secret club of Apostles. Even before the Occupation and certainly during it the narrative seems to hum with an awareness of what may or may not be said, and the form of language acceptable.
The Penguin edition adds an extra layer to this. ‘The people of Flanders speak Flemish, a variant of Dutch which is distinguished from the version spoken in the Netherlands by minor differences in accent and vocabulary only,’ writes Arnold J. Pomerans in his ‘Translator’s Note’. The edition proclaims that it is translated from the Dutch, and the blurb even trumpets The Sorrow of Belgium as ‘the most important Dutch novel to have been published since the war’. All of which leaves a reader like me wondering what Claus – whose work has so much to say about language and how it relates to identity, and who is widely described as a Flemish writer – may have made of this. Would he have agreed with Pomerans’s assertion that the differences between Flemish and Dutch are so slight as to be negligible? Did he in fact write this book in Dutch? Or is this an example of an English-language publisher not wanting to risk putting readers off with too much intimidating detail? Would a novel billed as translated from Flemish (if that is what this is) have been a tougher sell?
Language use in the novel is fascinating in other ways too. The narrative bends to explore the limits of subjectivity, diving in and out of Louis’s consciousness so that we are often uncertain how much veracity to accord events. In a manner reminiscent of anglophone modernist greats such as James Joyce, Claus excels at depicting the partial, fragmentary nature of experience and perception. This is something that Louis, himself an aspiring writer, laments:
‘He failed to see connections between things, that was true. For one reason or another he found this proof of his inability to recognise the basis, no, the very structure of things, incredibly depressing. He swore all the way back home. Others were able to gain an immediate, coherent, rational picture of complex, fragmented objects, facts, incidents all around them, but not he, no matter how hard he tried, but then he didn’t try very hard, because he didn’t know how to.’
Yet what seems to Louis to be a failing is, Claus shows us, the reality of human experience. There is often greater honesty in scraps and fleeting impressions than in neat, coherent accounts. The desires and messiness of the body (often described in vivid detail) are more truthful than the high-flown, impenetrable rhetoric that figures such as Louis’s troubled mentor Rock deliver to classrooms of bemused schoolboys.
The personal is political, Claus and Van Reybrouck show us in their different ways, because it is often the best way we can appreciate what has happened. Patchy and flawed though this appreciation may be, it is necessary to keep us conscious of the distance we have travelled. Our grasp on reality is often feeble and fumbling. That is why we need storytelling.
The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus, translated from the Dutch (Flemish?) by Arnold J. Pomerans (Penguin, 1991)
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about books. Specifically, books about reading, writing and translating. This is partly because I find these kinds of books fascinating but also because my next book is going to be about rethinking the way we read. More details to follow soon…
So it was a joy to hear from academic, translator and champion of women in translation Helen Vassallo (if you haven’t yet come across her Translating Women site, it is a treasure trove of insightful commentary and exciting titles) about a new collection of work by French-Moroccan literary superstar Leïla Slimani that she had just brought into English. And an even greater joy when she kindly sent me a copy.
Unlike the novels that made Slimani’s name (chief among them Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny, as it was variously translated into English, which won the Prix Goncourt and became France’s most-read book of 2016) The Devil Is in the Detail brings together three slender works released separately in French. It is the first in a series published by Liverpool University Press with Florida State University’s Winthrop-King Institute that aims to showcase ‘cutting-edge contemporary French-language fiction, travel writing, essays and other prose works’ that ‘reflect the diversity, dynamism, originality, and relevance of new and recent writing in French’.
Certainly, the collection features a diverse range of prose. Short stories rub shoulders with essays. There’s the transcript of a staged conversation Slimani had with newspaper director and writer Éric Fottorino. And the volume ends with an urgent piece in praise of politician and women’s rights champion Simone Veil, followed by a selection of quotations from her. It is the sort of amalgam that marketing bods at mainstream anglophone publishing houses would veto in a heartbeat.
Thank goodness, then, for indies and university presses. Because the curation of these superficially dissimilar pieces reveals striking threads running through Slimani’s thinking and creative practice.
Take her views on reading’s relationship to feminism. For women, as she explains in On Writing, her interview with Fottorino, time with books is essential because ‘a woman who reads is a woman who is emancipating herself’. With this in mind, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, claiming that this is important to allow space for reading as much as for writing.
This idea of the part reading plays in shaping women’s agency is demonstrated in the short story ‘Elsewhere’. Protagonist Rim finds books hold the key to her freedom. Her father ‘gorged her with stories’, giving her the world in printed form so that in the end she is confident enough to go out and meet it on her own terms.
Slimani’s reflections on her writing are particularly fascinating. Unabashed about discussing her own struggles – from an abandoned project to inhabit the minds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to an unpublished first novel – she is disarmingly honest about the effort it requires: ‘There probably are such people, born writers destined for greatness, but I think there are a lot of people who just need to work hard, to meet the right person at the right time or need inspiration to strike at the right moment.’
Such frankness feels unfamiliar coming from such a lauded writer. In the English-speaking world, the fiction of the overnight success still has a powerful hold over the way we talk about books. (‘Ssh, don’t tell people that,’ a PR person muttered to a novelist friend of mine when they mentioned they had six failed manuscripts in their bottom drawer.)
But then, Slimani has always been a writer to challenge convention. Whether she’s penning gripping thrillers that win the highest literary honours (admittedly not such a departure in the Francophone world, where crime fiction more often receives critical acclaim), or exposing the hypocrisy underpinning the treatment of Moroccan women, she is unapologetic in her views, even when this risks controversy. Refusing to allow ‘a pseudo-respect for other cultures’ to muzzle her, she calls out injustice where she sees it.
Yet this forthrightness rests on a belief in the importance of togetherness and the joy of sharing space with those who think differently. The short piece ‘Our Gods and Our Homelands’ ends with an appeal for the France of 2016 to mirror the big Christmas meals Slimani remembers enjoying in Morocco as a child:
‘where everyone was welcome, where no one judged either the drunkenness of some or the outspokenness of others. Where the older generation did not dismiss the things the younger ones cared about, where everyone present chuckled at the blasphemers. Where at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was the awareness of how lucky we were to be together in a world where everything is hell-bent on dividing us.’
As we move into 2024, may our world take on more of the spirit of Slimani’s childhood Christmases. And may our reading, like this collection, be wide-ranging, ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, engrossing and inspiring.
Thanks to everyone who continues to follow this blog, and whose comments, messages and suggestions keep fuelling and expanding my reading and writing adventures. Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year.
The Devil Is in the Detail and other writings by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Helen Vassallo (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of holding the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This sees me co-curating and participating in a range of events about international storytelling at the UK’s oldest book festival.
Highlights this year included getting to interview my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie – the writer I’ve most wanted to meet since I encountered his amazing memoir An African in Greenland (tr. James Kirkup) back in 2012. Building on our Zoom conversation last year, the discussion was as lively, joy-filled and life-affirming as his writing.
I also got to run a ticketed version of my Incomprehension Workshop for curious readers. It sold out and the responses were wonderful, further fuelling ideas for my next non-fiction book, of which, I hope, more soon.
Another lovely thing about the role is that I also get to hear about books from elsewhere and meet experts in storytelling from around the world. This year, these included international delegates from book festivals in Argentina, Botswana, Türkiye, India and Nigeria. From these passionate experts, I gleaned a number of book recommendations, including my latest Book of the month, which was one of several titles recommended to me by Dr T. Vijay Kumar, director of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.
Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman was a smash hit when it was published in India in the mid-2010s, drawing lakhs of readers, prompting the writing of two sequels and changing the course of its authors life, as Murugan explains in his afterword. It tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a married couple who find themselves coming under extreme pressure as the years go by without them having children. Despite the strength of their bond, the rituals, penances and indignities to which they feel obliged to submit in the quest for a child take their toll. At last, the pressure to participate in a controversial rite on the 18th day of a local festival pushes them to breaking point, bursting open the assumptions and prejudices that have made them who they are.
For anglophone readers from the global north, this novel is an intoxicating mixture of the familiar and the strange. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed loved ones battling infertility will find much to recognise in its pages. ‘Please save me from being the talk of the town,’ laments Kali, expressing perfectly the pain of having such private matters made public, while Ponna enters into a masochistic loop, goading herself through ever more punishing and demanding ordeals in the hope of having her prayers answered. ‘Seeking a life, we have pawned our lives,’ she says, while joining her husband to sneer at those with too many children.
Yet instead of medical procedures and gruelling rounds of drugs, Ponna and Kali must do penance, make donations to temples, drink bitter concoctions and ensure they win the gods’ and goddesses’ favour. And at the heart of the novel is the ancient rite that at once lures and terrifies them: the night on which men become gods and all rules are relaxed in the dark streets of a nearby town.
Translator Vasudevan has done a fabulous job bringing the narrative into Indian English. The rhythms and structures of the prose complement the subject matter and setting perfectly, while the repeated use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ gives the story a mythic quality, blurring the edges and making us half-believe we are reading a fable set long ago. Even linguistic challenges, such as the nuances of the Tamil term for son-in-law, are conveyed in an easy, conversational style.
Yet, despite the relaxed, sometimes mythic quality of the prose, there is nothing imprecise or vague about Ponna and Kali’s relationship. Murugan captures it perfectly, portraying the dynamism that keeps strong marriages alive and presenting a portrait of love that is truly touching – and makes the threat of its unravelling all the more poignant.
There is sharp-eyed comment on contemporary issues too. The legacy of colonialism threads through the pages, knotted around a family story of a humiliating and degrading competition run by a British officer, in which Kali’s grandfather participated.
But the natural world is never far from the story. The tone for this is set in the opening lines, with the planting of the Portia tree that rises and spreads its branches over Kali and Ponna’s travails throughout the course of the book. Alongside this, a number of other natural symbols dot the narrative, drawing and concentrating the reader’s gaze, and complicating questions just as they seem to become clear. ‘He never explained anything. He only drew your attention to things,’ writes Murugan of Kali. He could be describing his own writing style too.
In his afterword, Murugan explains that the novel was prompted by hearing a single word (which he does not reveal) and that writing the story taught him what can happen ‘if the world of values packed within a word bursts open’. ‘I am very eager to know the kinds of experiences it [One Part Woman] might now bring to literary readers across the world,’ he explains. Well, Perumal Murugan, your book centres around one word for me too: wonderful.
One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press, 2019)
Would you like me to come to one of your book group meetings? If so, read on…
Later this month, my second novel, Crossing Over, will be published by Renard Press. Built around an encounter between a Malawian man who arrives on one of the small boats crossing the English Channel and a woman with dementia living on the Kent coast, the book is my attempt to put the humanity back into the story of the so-called migrant crisis.
The subject matter is close to my heart. I’d long wanted to write about Operation Dynamo (the 1940 Little Ships mission that saw ordinary people risking their lives to evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk during World War Two). I found the idea of that crossing very moving, while at the same time suspecting that it had been idealized in the national imagination.
Then, in 2016, I moved to Folkestone on the UK’s south coast and started to hear stories of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. I knew about the crisis in the Mediterranean and had been deeply affected by the BBC’s Exodus documentary series, featuring a number of people making the treacherous journey to Europe.
It was clearly only a matter of time before such crossings became a frequent occurrence closer to home, even as the rhetoric around immigration hardened in the UK parliament and media. What would it be like to write a story that brought together the two kinds of crossings, which held such different statuses in the national discourse?
Crossing Over was the result. Written in an intense nine-month period in 2017, the story sprang to life on the page. It also brought in a lot of the thinking about language, storytelling, and the ways we try and fail to understand each other that I’ve done through this project over the years.
Yet, although I felt it was my best work so far, back in 2017 publishers didn’t think there was a market for the story. It took five years to find a home for it. In that time, I’ve been privileged to work with many asylum seekers in my local area through workshops funded by the Royal Literary Fund and run in collaboration with charities including the Kent Refugee Action Network and Samphire. This has deepened my belief in the importance of using stories to build bridges between people, especially in times of difficulty and division.
So it will be a proud moment when Crossing Over finally comes out in print on 26 April. I have several celebrations planned, but the first of them could involve you. If you think your book group might be interested in reading Crossing Over, please leave a comment below or email ann[at]annmorgan.me by 31 May. All those who do will be entered into a draw and I will attend the winner’s book group discussion of the novel (either in-person or on Zoom).
In the meantime, if you need a bit more information, my publisher, the lovely Renard Press, has put together a handy book group questions guide, which you can find below. This will give you a flavour of the sort of themes the novel involves.
