Category Archives: The stories

Book of the month: Raharimanana

January 28, 2026 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

In the midst of some pretty gloomy headlines over the last month or so, online African literature magazine Brittle Paper brought heartening news. Its 100 Notable African Books of 2025 shows up some encouraging trends: around a third of the titles on the list are translated from a broad spread of languages, including Shona, Malagasy and Arabic. What’s more, in addition to works by globally renowned names such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abdulrazak Gurnah (my 2012 pick for Tanzania, years before he won the Nobel Prize), debuts make up around a third of the entries.

Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that 62% of the books are published by independent publishers or presses based in Africa. It seems that the major British and American publishers, commonly known as the Big Five, are no longer calling the shots when it comes to determining what African stories appear in the world’s most read language.

My latest Book of the month is one of the titles on the list. An Advance Reading Copy was sent to me by its translator, Allison M. Charette. Some years ago she brought the first novel from Madagascar into English after learning through this project that there was no full-length fiction from that nation of some 30 million people available in English translation. Now she’s back with another: Return by the Malagasy author, essayist, poet and playwright Raharimanana, a novel which follows another writer, Hira, on a surreal book tour as he and his story roam ‘the wide world over’, trying to reconcile his happy childhood memories with the reality of his father’s political persecution.

Before I go on, I should offer a health warning: writing about a book like this presents many challenges for the citizen of a former colonial power like me. So much of the vocabulary that has become standard in literary criticism assumes the primacy of the European novel form. Even seemingly innocent formulations can carry the implication that works by writers such as Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy and co are the gold standards against which everything else should be judged. I have made an effort to weed this out of my writing, but it’s possible that elements of it linger. Read with care.

In fact, reading with care and questioning the assumptions built into dominant narratives is one of the central threads of Return. Among the many instances of this are Hira’s memories of his younger self discovering the problems with the perspective of many of the Western films aired in his father’s makeshift cinema:

‘Hira did have a sense at the time, a vague sense of what was playing out, of how the white man was always the embodiment of order, justice and good. Yul [Brynner] belonged to the civilizations that had to be conquered absolutely: magnificent but savage, magnificent but bloodthirsty, magnificent but merciless, magnificent but conquered, ultimately conquered, Yul Brynner humiliated by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, burned at the stake in Taras Bulba, strict to the absurd in The King and I, Deborah Kerr meant to provide a good and proper education for his son, and for the great king Yul, to boot! It infuriated Hira, why should they have to follow white people’s laws and customs? He would have slapped that Deborah Kerr governess across the face!

‘One time, before they left for the rec room, he asked his father: Why does Yul Brynner always lose, aren’t there any movies where he wins? “The Magnificent Seven”, his father said, he wins in “The Magnificent Seven”. No, I mean where he’s the main character! His father got that small smile on his face that irritated him so much…’

Raharimanana’s narrative works on different terms, making Hira and the events of his home community and continent the focus, and pushing European concerns and structures to the margins. While the German holocaust is mentioned in passing, the horrific events that devastated Rwanda in 1994 – ‘a genocide rocked by a lullaby’ – receive painstaking attention, shaking Hira and the reader to the core.

I repeatedly find myself wanting to call this approach a recalibration of or a response to European narratives, but this feels reductive. It is as though the colonialist in me still needs to see Europe at the centre of this novel, and if it can’t be the hero then it must be the villain, the main negative force against which the story fights. In fact, for much of the book, Europe and its concerns are also-rans – small and rather far away.

The treatment of time is intriguing. Present and past are woven together. Memories are plaited into contemporary events. Like Hira on his book tour, we often don’t know where or when we are. ‘The feelings we keep from the past produce more than our lived reality,’ we read at one point. Often this seems to be the state in which Hira operates.

There is also a deeply sensuous quality to the writing, with the impact of ideas and events often presented primarily through the body rather than discussed and analysed. This heightens much of the novel’s beauty – we feel the splendour of the landscape, for example, and our senses thrill to the wonder of the comingled heritages present in the Malagasy population. But it also intensifies the moments of horror and violence, taking us into suffering in a direct and visceral way.

This is powerfully deliberate: writing, Raharimanana proposes, is the way that Hira and perhaps all of us can find a way to move through and past horrors. Fiction is our best hope of confronting the incomprehensible.

And there is much in this book that will be incomprehensible to anglophone readers. The repeated references to Hira failing to understand things, finding himself conversing with people who don’t speak his language, and grappling with concepts that elude him make it clear that this is a fundamental part of the reading experience and probably something many readers of the original version go through too. However, with the language shift and perhaps added cultural distance that comes with it, more of the passages of this book may play out beyond the English-language reader’s grasp.

At such moments, like Hira, we can only give ourselves over to momentum, letting the whirling tiomena of the narrative sweep us along. An uneasy experience, perhaps. But well worth it when the visibility clears and we can look back and appreciate how far we’ve come.

Return by Raharimanana, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Seagull Books, 2025)

Picture: ‘Madagascar’ by Eugene Kaspersky on flickr.com

Book of the month: Yun Ko-eun

December 23, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

‘What have you got in that you’re excited about?’ I asked Hunter at the Folkestone Bookshop when I popped in a while back.

As often happens when I walk into that place, this was the start of a long, fascinating conversation, in which I was ushered from shelf to shelf and table to table, and shown multiple tempting titles, many of them originally written in languages other than English.

I bought several, but one in particular stuck in my mind: Yun Ko-eun’s Art on Fire, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler. It was the premise that got me. Since I read the hilarious Lake Como by Srđjan Valjarević, translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić, for Serbia during my 2012 year of reading the world, I’ve had a weakness for novels that poke fun at art residencies. Indeed, beyond the titles I’ve featured on this blog, one of my favourite reads of this year was Ella Frears’s Goodlord, a book-length narrative poem in the form of an email to an estate agent, which features a section describing a disastrous experience at an artists’ retreat.

Art on Fire sounded like it was cut from similar cloth. Struggling artist turned food-delivery person An Yiji thinks her luck has turned when she is awarded a residency at the prestigious Robert Foundation in California. But there is a catch: the programme is overseen by Robert, a wonderdog who takes photographs and selects the participants, and at the end of each artist’s time at the Foundation, he chooses one piece they have created to be burned.

As the premise suggests, this is a novel that teeters on the surreal. So much about An Yiji’s experiences is recognisable – from the Californian wildfires that delay her collection from the airport to the lumbering mechanisms of the art world – and yet everything feels as though the contrast has been shunted up a notch or two, making the colours faintly cartoonish.

Nowhere is this more true than with the figure of Robert, the Foundation’s eponymous and unnervingly gifted dog, who communicates by means of a mysterious black box and several interpreters. He has very particular views on how artists should interact with him and writes An Yiji a series of passive-aggressive letters that keep her constantly on edge.

Coupled with the narrator-protagonist’s heightened mental state, this makes for an intense and often very funny read. An Yiji is so riddled with imposter syndrome that when the Robert Foundation’s director phones to offer her the placement, she assumes it’s a spam call. Perhaps as a result of the run of disappointments that have dogged her career, she tends to look for the worst in situations. To read her encounter with the skewed logic of the Foundation is to be taken into the fraught mindset many of us may have experienced during the height of the pandemic, when months of isolation made even the simplest things strange.

This unpeeling from reality allows Yun Ko-eun to show up the cracks in many of the things we take for granted. The uneasy relationship between art and commercialism comes under the spotlight, for example, when representatives from the nearby town of Q court An Yiji in the hopes that she will feature their businesses and settings in her work. There’s a brilliant interrogation of the concept of authenticity, which is approached from many angles and comes to a head through the fact that An Yiji’s story is being developed into a film by an actor she met on her way to the residency, who needs her to work with him and the director to decide the ending.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is the discussion of translation that runs throughout the pages. Robert’s approach to communication is intriguing: ‘While humans communicated with one another line by line […] Robert saved the entire space-time of a conversation in his head, like an enormous file transfer system.’ This means that there are several stages – and people – required to compress and reorder human utterances into messages he can digest. What’s more, although An Yiji speaks English, during their conversations she is required to speak through a Korean translator. She becomes enraged when she realises the intermediary is swapping her words for terms Robert prefers during their conversations, with the result that ‘phoenix’ becomes ‘Korean pigeon’ and ‘coffin’ becomes ‘supercar’.

Knowing that we are reading all this in Lizzie Buehler’s translation adds another level to the satire, making this a wonderful example of a book where the translation offers even more than the original.

And Art on Fire certainly offers plenty to start with. It is a rare instance of a deeply funny, feel-good book that has important, thought-provoking things to say about the world we inhabit. Reading it, I was reminded of the words of Eritrean writer Alemseged Tesfai, who told me about the use of humour in his work: ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target.’ Art on Fire hits its target repeatedly and gives us a lot of entertainment in the process. Highly recommended.

Art on Fire by Yun Ko-eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler (Scribe, 2025)

Thanks so much to everyone who has read my work, attended my events and bought my books this year. Your support, enthusiasm and suggestions play a huge part in keeping me going. If you’d like to join the free Incomprehension Workshop taster on Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 7.30pm GMT, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA#/registration

Wishing you all a very happy New Year and many wonderful reads!

Book of the month: Alla Gorbunova

November 28, 2025 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg

Books come to me from many directions these days. Emails from publishers. Messages from readers of this blog. Suggestions from other writers. Reviews. Social media posts. Conversations with booklovers around the world.

In many cases, I hear about books before they are available. And while I try not to focus on the latest thing on this blog (because good books have long tails and I think the relentless emphasis on the new is one of the book industry’s many problems), I frequently find myself tempted to pre-order things that will be published months down the line.

So it often happens that a book arrives in the post or drops onto my e-reader seemingly out of the blue, long after I’ve forgotten who or what led me to be interested in it in the first place.

This latest book of the month is a good example. Some weeks ago, the cryptically titled (Th)ings and (Th)oughts appeared on my Kindle. As titles on e-readers cannot be easily flicked through or turned around, I started to read it with almost no idea what it was or where it was ‘from’ – much like the participants in my incomprehension workshops, who gamely tackle texts with no contextual information to anchor their reading.

If I’d had a physical copy, publisher Deep Vellum’s blurb on the back cover would no doubt have left me equally intrigued but perhaps none the wiser:

‘Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a clerk realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky; skeletons turn up in abandoned lots; a hapless everyman named Ivan Petrovich travels through a madcap Boschian afterlife, coming face-to-face with his own shortcomings, but failing, time after time, to get it right.’

‘The only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane?’ Surely it’s not possible for someone living inside Russia today (as the little I can find about Gorbunova online suggests she is) to write such things?

In fact, Gorbunova goes a lot further than the blurb suggests, depicting Putin with horns in one story and engaging in a range of reflections on evil and corruption that make little secret of their targets. In one of the Ivan Petrovich pieces, the title hero is tasked with interviewing students and awarding marks according to what bribes have been offered.

As the Russianness of the text began to swim into focus, these things started to challenge my reading. As I explore in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read – in which I discuss my correspondence with Alemseged Tesfai, a writer in Eritrea, widely believed to be one of the most restricted and censored societies on earth – reading a book from a place that we believe has active state censorship can make strange things happen in our minds. The knowledge that the words on the page might not be freely expressed or might have exposed their author to risk has a disruptive impact. As I read (Th)ings and (Th)oughts, I veered between fear for Gorbunova’s safety and incredulity at what she had got away with, which then made me suspicious of whether she has special privileges and is a kind of protected state artist or whether the collection is a form of double bluff, a cynical attempt to convince naïve Westerners like me that the Russian government is much more open and less restrictive than I’ve been led to believe. I found myself reading through the eyes of Putin’s censors as I imagine them to be, on the lookout for subversive statements and turns of phrase, struggling to relax into the text.

Even the discovery that the original collection was published in Saint Petersburg in 2017 when the situation certainly appeared rather different did little to ease my mind. I thought of a conversation I had recently with Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil and translator Joshua Freeman, whose powerful memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night I featured earlier this year. One of the mechanisms the Chinese government often employs is retrospective bans, rendering certain statements unacceptable after the fact and arresting writers for books that have been published with no problem years before. Surely a similar risk could menace Gorbunova here?

It’s testament to Gorbunova’s writing, and Elina Alter’s translation, that the storytelling is strong enough to drown out this noise. This is, in part, due to something she shares with Alemseged Tesfai – a love of and gift for humour. ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target,’ Tesfai told me.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts seems to take a similar approach. Many of the stories have an absurdist slant that reminds me of the work of Nikolai Gogol. Others trade off their brevity, pulling out the rug from under their characters so that the piece ends with a bathetic thud. In addition, Gorbunova seems to relish mismatching situations and registers to wring humour out of them. From the psychoanalyst drafting a memo to advise clients on how to navigate the ‘difficult circumstances’ that come from being consigned to hell for eternity to the angel handing out iPads and iPhones, there is a mischievous thread of linguistic playfulness woven through this collection.

Yet this lightheartedness is by no means lightweight. A deep understanding of human psychology underpins the pieces so that characters are often at their most relatable when they are behaving most perversely. Mishenka the Contrarian is a great example – a man who because of the cruelties he has witnessed, has made an art of transforming ‘acorns of suffering into the gold of gladness’. I also loved the brief portrait of the art critic N, who risks blowing up his life by posting everything he’s always wanted to say on Facebook.

Through it all runs a sense of affectionate cynicism. Things will probably turn out for the worst, the stories seem to be saying, but it might not happen. And we’ve got to play the cards we’re dealt. Life goes on and we are all part of it, all sitting in an ‘auditorium filled with laughter – a laughter heard since the beginning of the world, as people laugh at the shame and suffering of the flesh – involuntary, helpless laughter, mixed with fear.’

Storytelling may be imperfect, compromised and subject to suppression and malign influence, but it is the best thing we have, even, and perhaps especially, when it is frustrated. The final piece portrays an orphanage filled with poets, a few of whom go on to work for a literary publication:

‘The magazine was published once every seven years on clumsily pasted-together sheets of fragile, yellowing paper, in a run of seven issues, which were all ritually torn apart and scattered over the sea unread, and it was called Hope.’

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2025)

Picture: ‘Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg’ by Pedro Szekely on flickr.com

Book of the month: Bachtyar Ali

October 30, 2025 By in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m very fortunate to receive messages from readers and writers around the world telling me about books I might like to read. Many of the titles I’ve featured on this blog are the result of conversations with people in parts of the planet from which we English speakers rarely hear stories. Examples include: Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame, sent to me by Colin after a discussion with a bookseller at Libraria Dukagjini in Pristina, Kosovo; and The Golden Horse, the manuscript translation of which was emailed to me by author Juan David Morgan after it was recommended to me by the Panama Canal on Twitter. (Yes, really.)

Sometimes, however, I’m lucky to stumble across amazing stories from elsewhere closer to home. This latest Book of the month is a case in point: a few weeks ago, I spotted a new shop on the Old High Street near where I live in Folkestone, UK. It was, according to a sign in the window, a bookshop, gallery and publisher. Intrigued, I went inside and got talking to Goran Baba Ali, an author and co-founder of Afsana Press, which seeks to publish stories that have a direct relation to social, political or cultural issues in countries and communities around the world.

After a pleasant chat, I bought one of their titles, The Last Pomegranate Tree by Kurdish writer Bachtyar Ali, translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, and headed home. I was excited to read the book but also a little nervous. I really hoped it was good. It could be a little awkward the next time I bumped into Goran otherwise…

The novel begins with the release of 43-year-old peshmerga fighter Muzafar from a desert prison after 21 years. Yearning to reconnect with his son Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was arrested, he embarks on a quest to discover what happened to the boy. In so doing, he confronts the horrors visited upon his homeland and compatriots, the truth about love, loss and compassion, and what it means to be human.

Magical realism is a term I treat with some suspicion. In certain contexts, it can be used by critics to lump together and diminish anything in stories from elsewhere that doesn’t conform to certain Western norms. It is a term that has been applied to this book by some reviewers and I can see why: the story features many extraordinary creations and happenings. There is a character with a glass heart. There are women with hair that tumbles, Rapunzel-like, from windows down to the ground. The rules of the world are liable to tilt and twist. But in Ali’s hands, these happenings do not feel curious, exotic or strange, but rather expressions of deep truths, ‘that something always remained unexplained’, that when you live in a world where everything can be taken from you nothing is impossible.

One of the first things about this book that thrilled me (and there were many), was the beauty of the writing. Ali and Abdulrahman’s prose glitters with exquisite imagery. The pomegranate tree of the title stands on a mountaintop, ‘which rises up above the clouds like an island surrounded by silver waves’. Muzafar’s former friend Yaqub has ‘a strange gentleness in his words, as if you were standing near a waterfall and the wind was spraying the water towards you or you were asleep under a tree and the breeze had awoken you with a kiss’. Upon gaining his freedom, Muzafar ‘felt like a fish that had leapt back into the water from a fisherman’s net, its heart still filled with the recent shock of its probable death’.

This beautifully direct, expressive prose carries brilliant insights. Many of them centre on the enmeshment of humanity with all beings, ‘that the earth and life are a single interconnected whole’. Some reveal the mechanisms we use to deny this and insulate ourselves from others’ suffering. One of the sharpest examples of this is a passage in which a character advocating for the marginalised streetseller community is interviewed by a journalist:

‘That night by the fire, the journalist spoke about the wealth of agriculture and the yield of livestock, but Saryas spoke about the neglected and forgotten wealth of the thousands of abandoned children who found themselves on the streets from the age of four. The journalist talked about the charm of the cities, of clean pavements and the right of drivers to sufficient space for cars, but Saryas talked about the lost beauty of those children, himself included, who were forced to wash in filthy swamps because they had no access to clean water. The journalist argued for the return of the villagers to the countryside, Saryas for the return of people to a decent life.’

The writing is so powerful here. You can hear the conversation unfolding. The shift in register between the presentation of the two speakers’ statements shows us how they miss each other, the distance between them, and the way privilege and partisanship deafen those who imagine themselves openminded and fair.

Time marches to a beat that will be unfamiliar to some Western readers in this novel. Instead of the clockwatching chronology of many anglophone stories, there is a sense of a larger scope. A kind of deep time is at work, in which individual human destinies are only small parts of a much larger picture. ‘A person is a star that does not fall alone,’ reflects Muzafar. ‘Who knows where the echo will reverberate when we leave this earth? Perhaps someone will rise from our ashes in another time and realise they have been burned by the flame of our fall.’

The storytelling is similarly expansive. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that we readers are in the story too, cast as fellow refugees on a ferry Muzafar is taking to England in an effort to complete his quest. We are listening to Muzafar, whose account loops back on and contradicts itself, dented by his preoccupations and fears.

The effect is marvellous. This is honestly one of the best books I have read in a long time – so humane, so moving, so engrossing and so beautiful. To me, it is a reminder that we can find extraordinary, underrepresented voices anywhere. I live in a small town on the south coast of the UK and there is someone publishing world-class Kurdish literature a few minutes’ walk from my house.

The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman (Afsana Press, 2025; US first edition Archipelago Books, 2023)

News: São Tomé and Príncipe collection published after 13 years

October 22, 2025 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that happened during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country (and there were many extraordinary things) involved the small African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe.

Of the 11 or so UN-recognised countries that had no commercially available literature in English translation at the time, this proved by far the trickiest to source a book from. So much so that, as you can read in my original blog post, in the end a team of nine volunteers translated A casa do pastor, a collection of short stories by Santomean-born writer Olinda Beja, especially for me.

Now, 13 years later, that collection of short stories, is finally available to buy in English. Edited by leading Spanish and Portuguese translator Margaret Jull Costa OBE, one of the generous nine volunteers who answered my 2012 appeal, it has just been published by new Canadian indie Arquipélago Press.

The creation of this translation remains one of the most heartwarming and encouraging examples I’ve encountered of how stories can bring us together. It is wonderful to see these beguiling tales finally available in the world’s most published language.

As I say in my foreword to the book: ‘every so often, I receive a message asking if the collection of stories I read for São Tomé and Príncipe back in 2012 is available to buy in English. It is now my great joy to be able to answer: Yes, here it is.’

The Shepherd’s House by Olinda Beja, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, translated from the Portuguese by Yema Ferreira, Ana Fletcher, Tamsin Harrison, Margaret Jull Costa, Clare Keates, Ana Cristina Morais, Robin Patterson, Ana Silva and Sandra Tavares (Arquipélago Press, 2025)

Book of the month: Ning Ken

September 25, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:

‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’

The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.

On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.

Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.

In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’

In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.

Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’

Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)

What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.

This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’

The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.

Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)

Book of the month: Nauja Lynge

August 29, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).

It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!

In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.

If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)

But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.

Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.

From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?

Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.

This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:

It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.

The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.

Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.

Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.

As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.

There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.

However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’s The People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?

For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.

Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)

Book of the month: M.G. Sanchez

July 28, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back.

He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula). It was, he told me, an amalgam of Spanish and English with bits of Maltese and Genoese thrown in. In fact, the literary scene in Gibraltar was similarly fascinating, a kind of experiment in answering the question of how small a population you need to establish a literary culture. 

Yorkshire-based M.G. Sanchez is a key player in this, having co-founded Patuka Press, which publishes anthologies of Gibraltarian writing. Indeed, several of Sanchez’s own books feature Llanito and his most recent has both an English and a Llanito edition. The title that caught my eye on his back catalogue, however, was Diary of Victorian Colonial and other Tales, my latest Book of the month.

Originally published in 2008 through Rock Scorpion Books, a now-defunct publishing forum that Sanchez also founded after he struggled to find an outlet for Gibraltarian work, Diary is Sanchez’s second work of fiction. It features one novella and two shorter works that, according to its marketing material centre on ‘themes of emotional and geographical displacement’.

The title work is the most ambitious piece. Chronicling the return of ex-convict Charles Bestman to Gibraltar, the land of his birth, in the nineteenth century, it explores what it means to belong and how history can entrap us in many senses. After this comes ‘Intermission’, a stream-of-consciousness account of a UK-based magazine publisher’s snap decision to give up the world and enter a French monastery. Last and, for my money, least is ‘Roman Ruins’, the story of an Italian lawyer’s attempt to save a homeless Kosovan man.

Voice is one of the key strengths of Sanchez’s writing. The first two pieces lift off the page thanks to compelling, energetic and distinctive first-person narrators. The diary form is not easy to pull off and sustain for a whole work of fiction, and it’s credit to Sanchez that Bestman’s account is engaging, and peppered with telling observations. Meanwhile, the would-be monk of ‘Intermission’ is often extremely funny. His claim that the notorious British serial killer Fred West looked ‘a bit like an ugly Tom Jones’ had me laughing out loud. Although his spiel is occasionally repetitious and tips over into raw ranting on a few occasions, lines like this meant that I was more than happy to stay with him for the ride. There is a rich, mischievous seam to the writing in the first two-thirds of the book that put me in mind of anglophone authors such as Helen DeWitt and C.D. Rose, as well as the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.

It’s also fascinating to see colonialism and Britishness discussed from fresh angles, as Sanchez does in the first two pieces. There is a Trojan horse element to many of the passages, with certain ostensibly harmless or familiar formulations being used to smuggle in sentiments that challenge the status quo or reframe ideas. Some of these, such as the magazine publisher’s reflections on political correctness gone mad, now feel a little dated, but many are still disconcertingly fresh.

There’s a meta element to the title work too. At the end of the text, an editor’s note informs us of the way in which the diary was discovered and praises Rock Scorpion Books for publishing it after it was rejected by many other outlets. Finding a way to be heard and recognised is, it seems, part of the story.

Language has a big role to play in this. Llanito and Spanish feature in dialogue in the opening piece, while French appears in ‘Intermission’, and Italian and Serbian ring the changes in the final story. Multilingualism and pluralism are part of the fabric of this literary world, with Sanchez rarely choosing to translate on the page. Bewilderment and codeswitching are de rigueur.

All that said, the final story is an odd fit in this collection. Whereas the first two pieces complement each other tonally, stylistically and thematically, ‘Roman Ruins’ feels as though it is out on a limb. From the retail blurb, I see that a story called ‘The Old Colonial’ is listed in its place in the collection, and I wonder if a late need for a substitution has led to this piece being shoehorned in.

Certainly, there is a stilted, slightly unfinished quality to it. Characters often seem to exist to make arguments rather than to act in their own right, with several conversations featuring long expositions of the history of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities committed during and since its collapse (although as I write this, I’m conscious that numerous literary traditions have a much higher tolerance for political and historical discussion than is generally accepted in anglophone literature – it may be that Gibraltarian literature does too). Coming after the mischievous, subversive antics of the first two pieces, the straightness of ‘Roman Ruins’ is hard to take. I also found the female lawyer less convincing than Sanchez’s male creations. All in all, the story felt uneven.

But then perhaps evenness isn’t necessarily a virtue, or a quality essential to every work or literary tradition. It may be that Sanchez and his fellow Gibraltarian writers are nurturing a literary culture that works according to other standards – one that has no need to appeal to the sensibilities of a citizen of the country that once colonised their homeland. Sanchez has since published numerous works that may have taken his writing in any number of directions. I’m intrigued to learn more.

Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales by M.G. Sanchez (Rock Scorpion Books, 2012)

Picture: ‘Gibraltar’ by John Finn on flickr.com

What is the future of English studies?

July 7, 2025 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event.

The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble?

But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled.

The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days.

This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them.

Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences:

  • Reading is…
  • The world is…
  • Stories are…

At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this:

  • Reading is boring
  • The world is crazy
  • Stories are exciting

It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me.

I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds.

Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more.

Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain.

There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University).

They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process!

I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories.

I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon!

Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com

Book of the month: Tahir Hamut Izgil

June 30, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells the story of his decision to flee his homeland, along with his wife and children, in the late 2010s, following decades of mounting discrimination and persecution of the Uyghur population in Xianjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China.

Through Izgil’s eyes, we live the experience of seeing your world contract to the point where there is no longer space for you to exist. The accounts of the imprisonments of many of Izgil’s friends and associates – often for minor or even unspecified breaches of the ever-shifting rules – are chilling and heartrending, yet it is the cruel absurdity of many of the directives that restrict everyday life that sticks in the mind. The requirement, for example, for Muslim clerics to participate in televised disco dancing competitions (and the brave attempt of one to embrace this insult as good exercise). Or the Looking Back Project, under which ‘many previous legal things had become illegal’, rendering authors vulnerable to being arrested for books that had been published with the censors’ blessing in previous years.

Perhaps most horrifying of all is the List of Prohibited Names, a sporadically updated inventory setting out which names may no longer be used. In light of this, anyone may suddenly find themselves banned from using the appellation by which they have been known all their lives. ‘A name is a person’s most personal possession,’ as Izgil, writing through Freeman, reflects. ‘If he cannot hold on to his own name, what hope does he have of keeping anything else?’

The way language is weaponised to curb and control is similarly disturbing. As the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Uyghurs grow ever tighter, seemingly innocuous words turn traitor. People called in for questioning are said to be taking ‘tea’, those removed to the concentration and re-education camps have been sent to ‘study’, if you have a black mark on your record, you are said to carry a ‘dot’.

Uyghurs too, learn to bury their meaning to keep safe:

‘A political campaign was a “storm”, while innocent people caught up in mass arrests or in a Strike Hard Campaign were said to be “gone with the wind”. A “guest” at home often meant a state security agent. If someone had been arrested, they were “in the hospital”.

Yet, language is also a source of great joy and beauty in this book. As Freeman explains in his introduction, poetry is a way of life in Izgil’s homeland:

‘Verse is woven into daily life – dropped into conversation, shared constantly on social media, written between lovers. Through poetry, Uyghurs confront issues as a community, whether debating gender roles or defying state repression. Even now, I wake up many mornings to an inbox full of fresh verse, sent by the far-flung poets of the Uyghur diaspora for me to translate.’

Poetry is central to this memoir too. Several of Izgil’s poems appear. What’s more, there is a beautiful litheness and directness to the prose, which captures key moments in the story with memorable clarity. When Izgil’s wife, Marhaba, learns that after years of fighting bureaucracy the family have finally received the visas that will enable them to escape to the US, her face opens ‘like a flower’.

Because of the quality of the writing, we feel the Izqil family’s bravery and the loss that goes with uprooting yourself from all you know (including necessarily severing ties with those who stay behind for their safety). As the best writing does, the story speaks for itself, urging itself on the reader, making the pages fly past.

Nevertheless, as I read, I found a question surfacing repeatedly in my mind. There are many urgent and brilliant stories by writers from persecuted minorities in the world today. Most of them do not find homes with some of the English-speaking world’s biggest publishers as this one has (coming out through Penguin Random House on both sides of the Atlantic). If they make it into English at all, such stories are usually released by small presses, which, as I often say on this blog, are where most of the risky, exciting, boundary-pushing publishing happens these days. (Books like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s The Convoy, translated by Ruth Diver and published in February by Open Borders Press, for example.)

So what is it about this story that has enabled it to cut through?

I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the book paints the West in a relatively flattering light. Although Izgil likens the contempt of the Han Chinese authorities to the attitudes of European colonialists and quotes a friend saying they wish China would conquer the world because the rest of us are so ignorant about the realities they are facing, the US is a place of safety for Izgil. It is where he can finally taste freedom once more and thrive. I think this is a picture that fits with what many of us in the English-speaking global north would like to believe about our homelands.

The second is that the story necessarily reinforces certain narratives about China that happen to serve Western agendas. This portrayal of the Chinese authorities as harsh and unpredictable feels familiar and relatively comfortable. In this respect, although it may challenge other preconceptions, this book will resonate with significant aspects of many people’s prevailing world view.

This is not to call into question anything Izgil has written: the atrocities he describes are well documented. Nor is it to detract at all from the brilliance of this book. Rather, it is to say that this may be a story to which many in the English-speaking world may be able to listen to more easily than we can to comparable narratives that do not align with Western agendas so neatly.

If anything, this may make this book even more important. It may speak more directly and powerfully about the refugee experience to many anglophone readers because it will not invite the sort of resistance that can often arise when we read challenging books from elsewhere. By happening to echo ideas that feel familiar and safe, it may move us to deepen our sense of humanity and connection with those forced to leave their homelands.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman (Vintage, 2024)