Category Archives: The stories

Book of the month: Tsering Döndrup

April 30, 2026 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

‘I wonder if you’ve considered any books from Tibet so far,’ Chris Peacock wrote in a comment on this blog a few weeks back. ‘In recent years, there have been an increasing number of translations from so-called “minority” peoples and languages in China such as Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Still a small number, relatively speaking, but there are some really significant books out there. My translation of the novel The Red Wind Howls came out this year, by Tsering Döndrup, one of the most prominent authors in contemporary Tibet. He’s a wonderful writer, and very worth your time.’

I love getting recommendations like this. Although I often feel guilty about how few of them I am able to follow up, it is one of the great privileges of this project that experts and booklovers all over the world share details of intriguing stories that would never otherwise come to my notice.

Peacock’s suggestion arrived at a fortuitous moment. I have long been meaning to seek out some Tibetan literature, having become increasingly intrigued by stories from minority communities in mainland China since featuring Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, the extraordinary memoir by exiled Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman. In addition, I’d been really intrigued by the novel Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran, another recent Book of the month. If a depiction of the region by a Beijing-based Sinophone writer could capture my imagination so powerfully, how might a narrative by a native Tibetan compare?

When my copy arrived, I was shocked to learn from Peacock’s introduction of the toll the sharing of the novel has taken on its author since he self-published it in 2006. The authorities seized all his copies on the pretext the book did not have an ISBN and, after a Chinese translation was released in Hong Kong in 2012, Tsering Döndrup had his party membership revoked, his passport confiscated and his salary and pension reduced through demotion. What was it about this story that made its author face such punishment?

The Red Wind Howls is broken into two parts. The first focuses on the experiences of Alak Drong, a lapsed lama who is sent with many compatriots to be turned into a ‘labour machine’ as part of the atrocities that followed the 1958 uprising and during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, ‘a time turned upside down’ that saw widespread famine, tens of thousands of Tibetans killed and many villages reduced to women, children and the elderly. Part two centres on Lozang Gyatso and Tashi Lhamo, another former lama (although one who adheres to his vows) and a young woman who enters into a sham marriage with him for her protection.

The first thing that struck me was the voice. I suppose because of its importance, bravery and the weightiness of the subject matter, I had expected the novel to feel rather dense. It would be a necessary rather than an enjoyable experience, I anticipated – one of those books that I felt pleased to have read rather than savouring in the moment. Instead, what greeted me (and credit is due to Peacock too here) was a fresh, irreverent, surprising narrative that dodged between registers, often undercutting high-flown rhetoric with earthy retorts.

There is a wonderful directness to the writing that allows Tsering Döndrup to take readers to the heart of his characters’ problems in a handful of words. ‘Trying to cultivate the land at more than eleven thousand feet above sea level brought about as much benefit and did about as much damage as trying to graze your cattle in the ocean,’ he writes, succinctly demonstrating the lunacy of the centralised agricultural policies that ravaged his homeland. Elsewhere, in order to convey the full force of the horror that engulfed Alak Drong and his peers when they were transported to labour in a forest hundreds of miles from home, he writes: ‘For a free person, a forest might be a nice vacation spot, somewhere to get away from it all. But for someone deprived of their freedom it’s the very opposite: it feels like a prison cell.’ A deep humaneness underpins the writing, extending not only to the characters and the wronged people for whom they stand but also to the reader and how they might struggle to get to grips with this story.

Structurally, the book feels unusual, at least to an anglophone reader like me. There are no chapters – a deliberate choice, as the author makes clear when he tells us, midway through, that ‘If this novel were divided into chapters, then this would be the chapter about the Eight Cold Hells.’ The narrative is far from linear, swooping between current events, memories, the future, other life incarnations and flashbacks. Some aspects of this seemed familiar to me – I explored a similar approach (without the layering of reincarnation) with the traumatised character of Jonah in my second novel, Crossing Over, in an effort to reflect the way that deep suffering disorganises events and throws a person out of time.

With The Red Wind Howls this initially discombobulating approach ultimately had the effect of making the reading experience easier: it absolved me of the need to try to grip onto dates and places, struggling to keep straight the details of this unfamiliar history. Instead, I could give myself over to the immediacy of the experiences described without trying to fit them into a larger pattern or make sense of them – indeed, as Tsering Döndrup shows us, there is no making sense of what Tibet endured during this period.

Yet there are some sharp psychological insights to be gleaned from it. Tsering Döndrup’s satirical eye comes to the fore in skewering both the hypocrisy of many of the religious figures, who readily betray their followers for their own benefit, and the perpetual revisionism of the authority figures, who are forever rewriting history in order to make failures either a success or the fault of those who suffer the most from them. Heartrendingly, he shows us what becomes of people when all is stripped away and how easily any of us might give up our principles in the face of persecution.

But this is not a polemic or a morality tale. Tsering Döndrup is a highly nuanced writer and though there are elements of satire in this book, there is none of the black-and-white thinking that often flattens issue-led novels. No-one is entirely innocent in the way things unfold and Tsering Döndrup resists apportioning blame along purely ethnic lines. The world of his novel is messier and more troubling than that.

Nor is this a world devoid of hope. It is there in the deeds of the anonymous well-wisher who annually slaughters a sleep tethered outside Lozang Gyatso’s tent so that he can survive without breaking his vows. It is in the awkward love that grows between him and Tashi Lhamo. And it is in the secret cache of sacred texts stored in a secluded cave in the hope of better times, texts that ultimately transform Tashi Lhamo’s life.

It is perhaps particularly cruel that a story that places its hope in books should have caused its author so much suffering. To date, although Tsering Döndrup’s other works are available in Tibetan, The Red Wind Howls remains off-limits in his native language. By bringing it into English, Christopher Peacock has allowed this powerful voice to speak to the world’s largest cohort of readers (when you count second-language speakers). Thanks, Chris, for bringing it to my attention.

The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup, translated from the Tibetan by Christopher Peacock (Columbia University Press, 2025)

Book of the month: Ysabelle Cheung

March 31, 2026 By in Asia, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

This book came onto my radar during the brilliant event about writing female experience I attended at Hong Kong International Literary Festival earlier this month. The panel featured three local authors, who spoke arrestingly about how they capture the pressures facing young women in Hong Kong today.

As soon as I heard the premise of the title story of Ysabelle Cheung’s debut collection, Patchwork Dolls, I was hooked. The story centres around young, marginalised women in a scarily believable version of New York, who sell their features to be grafted onto the faces of wealthy, white consumers keen to keep up with the latest Instagram trends. Indeed, as Cheung explained during the event, the story was inspired by Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker essay ‘The Age of Instagram Face’. I snapped up a copy of Cheung’s book and devoured much of it on my flight home.

One of the many things to admire in this collection is the sense of a hallmark running through it. Although this is Cheung’s debut, its voice and identity are deeply assured. Cheung’s specialism is near-realist dystopias – skewed portraits that show us our world in a slightly distorted mirror by walking now a few nightmarish steps down the road. There is the recluse who becomes infested with ‘head fungus’, and a letter from a woman forced into a life of continuous displacement sharing recipes with the great-granddaughter she will never meet. There is the matchmaking agency that parachutes strangers into identikit apartments and the app that allows bereaved people to track the ghosts of loved ones. The stories roam around the planet, taking in versions of Hong Kong, London and New York, as well as unidentified landscapes ravaged by consumerism and climate change.

It sounds bleak – and it’s certainly true that a ‘latent type of horror’ pervades many of these stories, as well as a righteous anger at the mess humans have made – but the collection is playful, ingenious and surprising too. In the great-grandmother’s letter, for example, Cheung raises several smiles by crashing together notions of survivalism and tradition with futuristic technology. ‘If you do not have these tools in the future, a laser crusher will survive’, the narrator instructs her descendant-to-be.

There’s also a choose-your-own-adventure story. I have to admit my heart sank when I saw this. I’ve never enjoyed this sort of book (although, admittedly, my experience of them isn’t vast – if you can recommend a good one, please do, especially if it’s translated) and as the mother of young children, I have been held hostage on more than one occasion by rambling stories about unicorns, cake and glitter, where my main concern has been to game the system so as to get to an ending as quickly as possible.

Perhaps mindful that selecting what happens next isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, Cheung appears to give the reader the option of skipping this story, also called ‘The Reader’. ‘Dear reader,’ she writes. ‘If you prefer to continue this story collection in the traditional way, please feel free to turn to the next story after this one. If you’re up for a little adventure, however, please proceed to the next page.’ And of course, in so doing, she ensures that all of us – even those who, like me, aren’t fans of this sort of fiction – give ‘The Reader’ a try, because who wants to think of themselves as the sort of person who isn’t up for a little adventure? (Indeed, as the title suggests, the whole story is really about us and our responses, encouraging us to notice what goes into our decision-making and what we look for as we work our way through texts.)

This sort of psychological astuteness is part of what makes Patchwork Dolls special. The author is attentive not only to her characters and the worlds they inhabit but to the responses of her reader. There is a wonderful humanity and pathos to the stories, as well as an uplifting hopefulness. This may be a world where nature is compromised and where boundaries are continually breached – where phones ‘grunt’ like living things and people use one another like objects. These may be visions of a reality in which, like the prospective great-grandmother, we grieve ‘being so much less of ourselves – so reduced in our want for the future’. But there is still beauty, even if it comes from surprising, even repulsive, quarters – in the lustre of discarded bits of parasitic fungus, for example. And there is still possibility: the fact that the great-grandmother writes her letter shows her conviction that there will be a future, no matter how tough and precarious, and there will still be pleasure to be had from taking care over the preparation of food.

The fact of Cheung writing is similarly encouraging. She and her fellow panellists, Kaitlin Chan and Karen Cheung, were forthright and open about the challenges facing their generation, particularly young women. Yet they saw these as a spur, rather than a barrier – something their writing could tackle and expose.

At the end of the acknowledgements to Patchwork Dolls, Cheung lays bare the motivations for her work: ‘And finally, to the teacher who said I would never learn to read; the magazine publisher who made me doubt my own words; the men who followed me home from school; and the authoritarian figures who dictate what we can, and cannot, write and say. You gave me a reason to write these stories.’

I look forward to seeing what Ysabelle Cheung does next.

Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung (Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2026)

Book of the month: Tatiana Țîbuleac

February 28, 2026 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Moldovan flag flying outside a brick building in an urban setting.

That summer we self-destructed more than we ever had before, and yet we had never been more full of life. Mum looked like a houseplant that had been taken out to the balcony. I looked like a lobotomised criminal. We were, finally, a family.

Moldova was one of the trickiest European countries to source an English translation from when I set out to read a book from every country in 2012. After months of searching, I blind-bought The Story of An Ant by Ion Drutse, translated from the Moldovan by Iraida Kotrutse, a volume that I couldn’t help feeling didn’t showcase Drutse or Moldovan literature at their best.

So it was with great excitement that I learnt that an English translation of a novel by one of the Eastern European nation’s most celebrated authors would be coming from the much-respected publisher Deep Vellum press. Here, at last, was an opportunity to see more of what Moldova could offer.

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, is the story of Aleksy, a misanthropic artist under long-term psychiatric treatment. At the suggestion of his doctor, he starts to write his story, focusing on the summer he and his mother spent in rural France when he was a teenager, as she endured the final stages of a terminal illness. What unfolds does not provide the clarity the medical professionals seek; instead there emerges a powerful portrait of how emotional neglect can warp a childhood, and the quest for reconciliation and peace.

This is the sort of book that would trouble people seeking the ‘spirit’ of a place in the books they read – the sort of readers who, as Monica Cure writers in her Translator’s Note, expect international stories to ‘bear the burden of ethnographic representation’. The novel is not set in Moldova. Indeed, Aleksy is not Moldovan but the grandson of Polish immigrants to London’s Haringey district. The majority of the action takes place in France. Other than in the publisher’s information, Translator’s Note and author biography, the word ‘Moldova’ does not figure in the book at all. What’s more, as Cure explains, she took the decision to render her version in a form of British English, giving the narrative a distinctive idiolect, run through with surprising rhythms.

The novel is risky in other ways too. Aleksy is a profoundly unsympathetic character, who lays into his mother from the opening sentence and drops the first of many suicide references on the second page. Yet, there is a directness and a humour to the writing that keeps us reading. ‘When they have a lot of money, people who are mentally ill are called eccentric,’ Aleksy tells us, and: ‘Dad thought that Pluto was the name of a dog, and that “activism” meant going jogging every day.’

As we read, cracks appear, allowing flashes of vulnerability to shine through, together with fragments of a backstory that form the complex mosaic of the narrator’s interior landscape. These often emerge in exceptionally beautiful writing. Remembering his little sister, Aleksy tells us: ‘she would laugh like a rainbow whose feet were being tickled’. At other points, it is the repetition of simple phrases that convey emotions that cannot be expressed directly. ‘And I shouldn’t be afraid,’ is the refrain in a chapter in which Mother shares a painful truth, telling us all we need to know about both their feelings.

The result is a profoundly moving portrait of the legacy of emotional neglect and the way such experiences warp our tools to build connections. Repeatedly, Țîbuleac and Cure employ imagery that blends pain and tenderness, capturing the yearning of the wounded child to receive love from the person who has hurt him most. ‘I would’ve wanted to pull out of her with red hot pliers all the untold stories, all the unsung lullabies, all the hair tousles I had been owed, but which she had hidden like a cheapskate,’ Aleksy tells us at one point, making his journey towards the quiet, loving acceptance of his mother’s final days extremely powerful.

In this, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is not a national or a regional story, but a universal tale. It is one of the most compelling and affecting novels I have read in a long time. I hope we will see more work by Țîbuleac in English very soon.

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure (Deep Vellum, 2026)

Picture: ‘Moldovan Mission’ by Geoff Clarke on flickr.com

Book of the month: Raharimanana

January 28, 2026 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 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)