Blog tour: Where Snowbirds Play

May 4, 2025 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in the dust.

In the international-literature arena, some of the names that spring to mind include Marina Sofia, Stu Allen and Tony Malone. These bloggers and others like them maintain an astonishing pace, easily equally my efforts in 2012 in many cases. And they’ve been going for years, bringing attention to thousands of titles that deserve to be better known by readers of the world’s most published language.

Within the anglophone literature sphere, there is a whole raft of other, equally industrious reader/reviewers. I knew little about them until my publisher, Renard Press, organised a blog tour for my novel Crossing Over two years ago. For a month leading up to the release of the book, I had the initially daunting but ultimately lovely experience of seeing my story thoughtfully and generously reviewed by a different book blogger each day. It helped build buzz around the book and, at what can often be an oddly lonely and unsettling time for an author, allowed me to enjoy seeing my work going out into the world.

I was so impressed by the blog tour that I wrote an article about it for The Author, the member’s magazine of the UK’s Society of Authors. As part of my research for this, I interviewed former English teacher Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag. I was amazed by what she told me: the volume of books she features is such that she operates a traffic light and scoring system to help her keep track of them, and she schedules her posts many months in advance. It sounds like a full-time job, except that, of course, for Linda and most other bloggers like her, it is unpaid: the only material reward they get for the hours and hours they spend reading, planning and reviewing are free advance copies.

Because blog tours are less of a thing when it comes to international literature, and because I only rarely feature brand-new books (preferring to promote older titles that deserve a second look) and only do one review a month, I have never taken part in a blog tour.

This month, however, I am making an exception for a title that is close to my heart. Where Snowbirds Play, Gina Goldhammer’s debut novel (published by Renard Press’s imprint Hay Press on 6 May 2025), takes us into the privileged world of 1990s Palm Beach, where British graduate Philip has just secured a placement at a new marine life institute. But all is not what it seems both among the super rich who fund him and in Philip’s own story. Soon, secrets, rivalries and financial scandals are bubbling to the surface, and as hurricane season looms it seems unlikely that everyone will escape unscathed.

I love this book for two reasons. Firstly, I love it because I’ve had the privilege of seeing it develop over several years in my capacity as a mentor/editor to its author. Working with a writer and seeing their ideas fill and rise until they find their fullest expression is an extraordinary process, and one that I’ve had the joy of experiencing a number of times since I was published, most frequently as a mentor for the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.

But I particularly love this book because it is so singular and true to itself. Only Goldhammer could have written it. As I say in the supporting blurb I gave for the book, the novel offers an arresting perspective on a lifestyle few experience firsthand. Taking readers into the heart of privilege, Goldhammer spins a compelling story that lays bare the tensions, frailties, desires and self-deceptions that drive human beings everywhere. Sumptuous, witty and surprising, this novel will transport you to a world that is at once absorbingly fresh, and a charming – and alarming – reflection of our own.

And I’m delighted to see that other readers are already recognising the book’s uniqueness. On one of the earlier stops in the Where Snowbirds Play blog tour, bobsandbooks wrote that they were ‘left feeling like this was something a little bit different’. I couldn’t agree more.

Where Snowbirds Play by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press, 6 May 2025)

Book of the month: Gaëlle Bélem

April 29, 2025 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by a writer from Réunion ever to make it into English? Since then, the first, There’s a Monster Behind the Door, also translated by Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. To my mind, The Rarest Fruit, which comes out in the UK and Ireland later this week, easily maintains this standard.

Based on the true story of Edmond Albius – an orphan slave raised by Ferréol Beaumont, a white botanist on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was known until 1848 – the novel explores appropriation and the injustices embedded in the economic forces that govern international trade to this day. When Edmond unlocks the secret to the pollination of vanilla, the consequences ripple out around the world, changing the Western palate and enriching many of those engaged in the commodity’s exploitation. But for its bright young discoverer, who harbours ambitions ‘to become the first Black botanist in this world of Rich Whites’ but ‘doesn’t have the right colour skin to have callings’, the repercussions are much darker and more painful, bringing him up against the systemic injustices and human cruelty that robbed him of his natural parents in the first place.

Rhetoric and rhythms are at the heart of Bélem’s craft. She wields repetition with a barrister’s flair, driving home the force of what she’s presenting and, by getting the reader to look and look again, forcing us to recognise injustices and assumptions that we might at otherwise choose to ignore, or else be habituated to. Take this early passage obliging us to unpack the significance of the first question Ferréol asks when he lays eyes on baby Edmond: ‘What is it?’

‘It’ – this ebony child that casts him into partial shadow as it comes between the curve of a pale sun and his screwedup eyes. ‘It’ – three kilos and six hundred grams of tender flesh, wrapped up like a black lamb in a woollen cloth. ‘It’ – a living bundle of obvious trouble.

Juxtaposition plays a similar role. As Edmond’s life turns towards ruin and jail, and, in the wake of so-called emancipation, he, like many others, finds himself bound by a ‘freedom that shackles him’, we read of the vanilla-infused delicacies dreamed up by leading chefs to grace the tables of the beau monde.

Structures like these make the injustices at the heart of the story evident without Bélem needing to state them. By writing in this way, she leads us to construct the points for ourselves rather than proclaiming them. We collaborate with her and the book seems to throw its arms around us, bringing all readers into the human story rather than excluding and shaming those who might take criticism of colonialism as a personal attack.

This profound understanding of human motivation soaks the novel in empathy. Instead of two-dimensional actors in a morality play, Bélem gives us human beings in the round. For all his blind spots and hypocrisy, Ferréol is a vulnerable, lonely creature whose world is enriched by the relationship he forms with his adopted son. Likewise, Edmond for all his hopefulness and brilliance, is not immune to exhibiting internalised racism and double standards. We see systemic injustice, but we also see human ingenuity and specificity – the ability to manoeuvre around seemingly immovable obstacles and build bridges against the odds.

All of which makes Edmond’s betrayal and the fallout from it particularly poignant. That these two people should be able to hold themselves aloof from social mores for so long only to collapse beneath the weight of expectations and their own conditioning is a tragedy – a painful revelation of the dangers of failing to recognise the limits on our own thinking when we imagine ourselves to be free.

Bullaun Press’s edition of The Rarest Fruit publishes in the UK and Ireland on 1 May. And for readers in the US, another version, translated by Hildegarde Serle, comes out from Europa in June. It would be very interesting to compare both English versions. The fact of their release only a month apart is surely testament to the power of the original text.

The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from the French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press, 2025)

Photo: ‘Vanilla’ by Linda De Volder on flickr.com

Sherborne Travel Writing Festival

April 22, 2025 By in Events, Literature festivals, My books Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), but I’ve also taken the stage at two travel writing festivals.

The second of these was the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which took place earlier this month. Now in its third year, the three-day event in Dorset, UK, is the brainchild of Rory MacLean, who is celebrated for writing genre-busting books about moving across and beyond national borders. His debut, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, was published in 1992 and is still startlingly relevant (and very funny) today.

Much like MacLean’s work, the festival celebrates travel writing in the broadest sense. The traditional formula of the white European reporting on how he finds remote corners of the globe was not much in evidence in this year’s line up. Instead, the programme included an extraordinary range of speakers, from the brilliant Nandini Das, who held the audience captive with a talk on Britain’s first bungling attempts to forge diplomatic relations with the Mughal Empire, to Kapka Kassabova, who spoke movingly of the three months she spent living with Europe’s last moving pastoralists in the mountains of her native Bulgaria while researching her latest book Anima.

I was privileged to take the stage twice. I started off in the interviewee’s chair, spending a wonderful hour talking about Reading the World with journalist and fellow translation champion Rosie Goldsmith (you can see us pictured above). Ten years on from the launch of the first edition of that book, it was a pleasure to reflect back on the journey so far and look forward to the publication of Relearning to Read this September. Goldsmith is one of the best in the business when it comes to chairing literary discussions. If you’re a fan of book podcasts, the Slightly Foxed Podcast, which she hosts, is well worth a listen.

Then it was my turn to ask the questions. I was joined on stage by Xiaolu Guo, who I had the privilege of chairing at Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. An artist who has travelled in many senses (across the world, between languages, between media, through books and across numerous periods of literary history), Guo is a fascinating writer and speaker. We focused on her memoir, My Battle of Hastings, which draws on a year she spent living in the British seaside town of Hastings, where William the Conqueror routed the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. But it was also great to touch on her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a feminist retelling of Moby Dick.

Offstage, there were many similarly fascinating discussions. It was a joy to meet many enthusiastic readers and writers, and a testament to the warm welcome Rory MacLean and his team offer that so many authors from the first two editions of the festival were also in attendance. The weekend was crowned by the announcement of a new annual travel writing prize attached to the festival, the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, which will be awarded for the first time next year to a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies. Given the breadth and creativity of the team’s vision of travel writing, it’s exciting to think of what this new award might do to broaden the field. And I wonder if in future years the organisers might be persuaded to expand the remit even further to include works published in English from all over the world.

In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival – those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is firmly in the second camp. I left fizzing with ideas and thrilled by new connections. It will be exciting to see where the festival takes us next.

Picture: courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith.

Book of the month: Hemley Boum

March 31, 2025 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This book was given to me by the Cameroonian writer Ernis, who I was lucky to meet in Assam last month. Conscious that I had not read any Cameroonian literature since Peter Green’s translation of Mongo Beti’s 1956 classic Mission to Kala, I asked her what contemporary writing from the country (in addition to her own, of course) I should know about. Her response was to press this novel into my hands.

Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated by Nchanji Njamnsi, is the story of three generations of women navigating a changing and turbulent world. Obliged to accept her daughter Abi’s care as she faces death, the historically aloof Anna reflects back on the events that have led her from Cameroon to Paris, and the education that at once enriched and distanced her from her roots. Abi, meanwhile, must contend with family breakdown and the pressures of caring, while Tina, a friend of her son Max’s back in Cameroon, finds herself caught up in a violent new threat sweeping her home region.

This is a book that disarms with its directness. Boum’s insights and the clarity with which she expresses them through her characters’ voices are startling and winning. Whether it’s the familiar setting of Paris made strange through Abi’s critical gaze or ‘the undeniable, exquisite delight in succumbing to violence and corruption’ that comes through in several of the episodes, there is a frankness to the writing that speaks to the humanity in people everywhere.

Often, this frankness centres on the ruptures caused by colonialism and the imposition of a foreign way of seeing, thinking and learning on a culture that operates by other means. ‘Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic,’ states Anna. ‘There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price.’

Such thinking jars with the more sensuous, embodied, holistic ways of knowing that used to be common in her home region. ‘Our people never claimed detachment from the world nor dominion over it.[…] We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead… we were all woven into the fabric of the world.’

Falling into the gulf between these two ways of being is a violent experience from which none of the characters in Days Come and Go escape unscathed. Boum makes us feel what this is like, taking us through the stages by which the women are led to conspire in their oppression and suffering so that we seem to live their experiences, from Anna’s grappling with maternal ambivalence and the toll this may have taken on her relationship with her daughter to Abi’s struggle to parent amid marital breakdown.

The most powerful section in the book is Tina’s account of how she and two friends got drawn into the terrorist group Boko Haram. This is an astonishingly insightful and compelling delineation of how people can be made to commit the worst acts, including suicide bombing. ‘Nobody asks a grenade about to explode, “Why?”‘ says Tina. ‘The reason is obvious: it has been unpinned. All they do is pull out our pins and throw us at good people.’

Boum makes us feel how those pins get pulled out. And in so doing, she commits a deeply humane act – making it impossible to ignore the humanity we share with those who do the worst things we can imagine, with all the hope and challenge that comes with this. With this understanding, we can make sense of things that might seem unfathomable to us, such as Tina’s silent appeal to Michelle Obama to stop speaking out against Boko Haram because such well-intentioned, distant activism only makes her tormentors crueller.

Yet an embodied approach to knowing does not mean a reduction in intellectual rigour. This is, in many ways, one of the most erudite novels I’ve read in a long time. It includes critiques of the work of John Steinbeck, Michelangelo and Frantz Fanon – Anna is not a fan of the latter: ‘my disinclination resides in the fact that there are people indeed more invisible than the damned of the earth – their wives.’

This is a novel that walks to a different beat than the sort of writing commonly celebrated in the anglophone literary world. As a result, readers used to mainstream English-language literature may stumble here and there over pacing that will not meet their expectations, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain statements or details. There is also drama-offstage, some declamatory monologuing and various other things traditionally frowned upon on creative writing courses.

And that’s precisely the point. Boum’s storytelling operates by standards other than Western norms, knitting together the emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual, and presenting these things as a glorious, moving, troubling unity. It is a book of extraordinary range and power. ‘What does a life boil down to?’ asks Anna. This, Boum shows us. This.

Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi (Bakwa Books, 2022)

Book of the month: Susana Sanches Arins

February 27, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

I heard about this title from María Reimóndez, a brilliant Galician writer, translator, interpreter, academic and feminist campaigner who I met at Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival earlier this month. Moved by what she had to say about the erasure the Galician language and culture has battled, I asked for her recommendations.

She mentioned several intriguing authors whose work ought to be translated into English, among them Begoña Caamaño (whose two published novels rewrite male-authored classics) and María Xosé Queizán. And for work that has already made it through the translation bottleneck into the world’s most published, language, she directed me to Small Stations Press, an indie that carries an impressive number of works in translation by Galician female authors, including Luísa Villalta and Anxos Sumai.

The title that stood out for me, however, was and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated by Kathleen March. Drawing on the author’s family’s involvement in the atrocities of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, it is, according to Reimóndez, ‘a wonderful lesson in how to answer the question that many people in the West sometimes ask – what do we do with people in our families who have been perpetrators or complicit with the most terrible crimes in history?’ As soon as I got back to the UK, I ordered a copy.

It’s just as well that Reimóndez recommended the book so warmly because I might have found the blurb and surrounding text a little offputting had I picked it up independently. The book is framed as uncategorisable, written ‘its own genre’ as translator March puts it or a ‘mosaic of miniature narrations’ according to María Xesús Nogueira in her introduction – descriptions that struck me as a little self-conscious and effortful, as though the writing would try too hard to be clever and impress.

But then I started to read. My goodness. The cleverness is there in spades, yes, but it is an embodied cleverness, suffused with feeling. As Arins grapples with the actions and omissions of her forebears, particularly, those of the sinister uncle manuel, she smashes up against the limits of a storytelling framework designed to silence dissent and minimise the transgressions of the powerful.

‘they say history is written by the victors, but it’s also true that they unwrite it. that’s how uncle manuel, who was bad and acted badly, is only in the registers of local history as the mayor of his town for a few years. and that’s all.’

All structures, including language itself, this book demonstrates, have been set up to muffle the truths the author needs to express.

As such, the radical, genre-busting elements of the book establish themselves as attempts to break free from constraints and embrace a larger, more generous mode of expression. From the eschewal of capitalisation and the use of repetition, revisions and contradiction, to the presentation of the text as fragments and the striking deployment of line breaks, we experience this text as a remaking of what it is to use language to explore the human condition.

While the book may forge its own kind of genre, as March claims, it has kinship with a number of other titles that smash accepted frameworks in order to approach unmentionable truths. Two that spring to mind are A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and translated from Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (which I discuss in my forthcoming Relearning to Read) and Zong! Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s radical excavation of the murder of around 130 African slaves for insurance purposes in 1781 told solely in words taken from the 1783 court case that determined their drowning was legal.

As in those works, an extraordinary empathy flows through the pages of and they say. The text considers the suffering and joys of all the living beings it enfolds, from oxen dragging heavy loads through to school children arguing over what duty they have to consider the wrongs of the past decades after the fact.

One of the book’s most striking elements is its readiness to embrace and own the fallibility of the author herself. Several times, we see accounts being challenged and revised. Readers even pop up in the text, disputing what was claimed pages before or correcting details. Memory, Arins repeats, is a ‘slippery eel’ and it would be ridiculous to claim that she has some sort of unquestionable authority (the sort of authority paraded by uncle manuel, perhaps) simply because she has set her words down in a book.

As a result of this, the book never ends. The edition I own is an ‘expanded version’, incorporating feedback and stories supplied by the first wave of Galician readers.

‘stories are always undone, and redone. voices are like hands that remove brick after brick.’

Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Arins writes, ‘the best thing that came out of the book for me was a phrase: i have to tell you a story.’

Even the notion of closing the final page and stepping away is undone in and they say. This is a book that invites us in rather than proclaiming a narrative we must meekly accept. It is one in which we participate, regardless of our knowledge of the events it explores, joining its community by virtue of our shared humanity.

and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated from the Galician by Kathleen March (Small Stations Press, 2021)

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival 2025

February 13, 2025 By in Literature festivals, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Last week, I got to chair my dream literary festival event panel. It featured Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (my Togolese pick for my original year of reading the world), Bhutanese author and publisher Kunzang Choden (whose The Circle of Karma I also read in 2012), and Bissau-Guinean writer, publisher and engineer Abdulai Silá, whose The Ultimate Tragedy, translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, was a book of the month of mine a while back.

Not only that, but the event took place in Assam, north-east India, at one of the liveliest and most inspiring gatherings of writers it has ever been my privilege to attend.

This was my second visit to Dibrugarh. The first took place in March 2024, when I was one of the cohort of writers from around the world invited to take part in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. That event was such a success that the university committed to host a further two editions of the festival. The first of these took place last week.

This time, my involvement in the festival was bigger. Not only was I present as a speaker, but I played a small role in suggesting and inviting some of the other authors in the months leading up to the event. As such, I had the joy of seeing a number of writers whose work I have long admired take the stage in Dibrugarh. They included the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren, who I met when our debut books came out in 2015; Northern Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, who I’ve known since we were aspiring authors in our teens; and Uzbek novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for my first book, Reading the World.

In addition, the festival brought a number of other intriguing writers onto my radar. With a focus on Africa, the programme included Cameroonian novelist Ernis, Congolese-Norwegian poet and novelist Raïs Neza Boneza and award-winner Joaquim Arena from Cabo Verde.

I chaired several panels with South African writer Shubnum Khan. Her work has only recently become available in the UK, in the form of her engrossing second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, but I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read her essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo in preparation for our discussion. Funny and illuminating, the book sheds light on the challenges of moving through the world as a Muslim woman. It would appeal to fans of Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black and ought to be more widely available. UK and US publishers, I’m looking at you.

Having one or two authors from around 20 nations present, alongside a host of wonderful Indian writers, made for an unusually level playing field when it came to discussing international issues. It was powerful to hear perspectives on questions such as the legacy of colonialism and the realities of migration from such a wide range of people and places. I think all of us had our eyes opened over the course of the festival.

The fact that these conversations were so inspiring and frank was also down to the ambience the university and the festival team created. The welcome in Assam is always warm, but this time the organisers went the extra mile. From the student volunteers who showed us around and the banners with author photos lining the campus roads to the delicious food and the world-class Dibrugarh University folk orchestra that played at the closing ceremony, the guests felt celebrated at every turn.

The same held true outside the university. When a group of us ventured out into town, bookshop owner Pradyut Hazarika invited us all for chai. The shop was one of eight branches of Banalata employing 200 staff across Assam, he explained, and the business not only sells but also publishes the Assamese titles it displays. This makes for a personal touch that is often missing in the book industry in other parts of the world.

The personal touch is also at the heart of DUILF. ‘Having established contact with you, you are now close to us in more ways than one and we shall make every effort to make you feel at home,’ wrote curator Rahul Jain in his welcome note to authors.

As we all left Dibrugarh to return to our lives around the world, dispersed like seeds from a pod as Lucy Caldwell put it, I for one certainly felt I was leaving a home from home.

Book of the month: Baqytgul Sarmekova

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

I love small presses. They are the heroes of the international-literature world, taking risks and bringing into Englishes stories that would never win the backing of the more conservative and commercially driven big houses.

Tilted Axis Press is one of several that I particularly admire. The essay collection Violent Phenomena that it published in 2022, exposing many of the inequalities embedded in the way stories travel, has been a huge influence on me. I refer to it several times in my forthcoming book Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (published by Renard, another lovely small press – preorder your copy here).

I also really admire Tilted Axis Press’s definition of itself as ‘an artistic project, for the benefit of readers who would not otherwise have access to the work [it champions]’ and ‘an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation’. In its small way, I hope this blog also works towards these goals.

So, when I heard that Tilted Axis was running a crowdfunder to help secure its future, I decided to go all in and make a sizeable pledge in return for choosing a bundle of their titles. This month’s featured book was one of these.

To Hell with Poets, translated by Mirgul Kali, is the first English-language collection by Baqytgul Sarmekova, a rising star of Kazakhstan’s literary scene. Wide-ranging and daring, its usually extremely brief stories present ‘shabby aul life’ and urban angst. Their subjects include a colt at the centre of a legal dispute, a family conned by a false betrothal, a dog left to fend for itself after its owner dies, and a woman caught up in an extramarital affair.

‘Parabolic’ was one of the first words that came to my mind when I started to read the collection, but it would be misleading to describe it this way. Though they are concise and contain some of the same symbolic resonance as parables, Sarmekova’s stories do not push a moral viewpoint and try to teach a lesson. Instead, they simply present life as it is, in all its bewildering grubbiness.

Often, as in the case of the title piece, the stories centre on women caught in patriarchal structures that strip them of their idealism and dignity. Indeed, the decision to include the year it was completed at the end of each story makes their achievement all the more impressive – many of these pieces were finished just as the #MeToo movement was beginning to sweep the anglophone world, and capture abuses with a directness and clearsightedness that is still out of reach for many.

Yet To Hell with Poets is not a bald attack on injustice. The situations it presents are nuanced and complex, and all players are at the mercy of forces greater than they are, as well as their blindness to others’ feelings.

The stories are also funny. Sarmekova has an eye for the grotesque. And there is a great deal of bathos in the abruptness with which several characters meet extreme fates. At times, a mischievous, gossipy tone breaks through the texture, almost as though the author is sitting with us, swapping anecdotes.

Indeed, there are moments when Sarmekova seems to make herself her subject. In ‘The Night the Rose Wept’, for example, the protagonist laments her tendency to notice imperfections and make cruel observations during moments of tenderness and connection: ‘I might notice a lipstick smudge on my friend’s teeth as she laughed with abandon, and a cynical thought would cross my mind. Or I might spot my other friend, standing apart from everybody and barely smiling because she was self-conscious of the wrinkles that appeared on her face when she laughed too hard.’ It is difficult not to hear the voice of the author here, reflecting on the cost of her gift for clearsightedness.

And gifted she certainly is: she has the ability to capture a character’s world in a sentence. Often a single detail tells us all we need to know about someone’s vulnerabilities and motivations. There is also a particular virtuosity in the way she handles endings – resisting the temptation to click the box shut too neatly, but rather finding something wistful and compelling that, even though it may be relatively tangential, elevates the piece.

Structurally, the stories feel a little repetitive. Sarmekova favours starting with an arresting image, personage or problem and then ploughing into back story to explain how it came about. The final story in the collection, ‘In Search of a Character’, breaks this mould and hints at new directions in her writing. It will be interesting to see how she develops this as she progresses. More please.

To Hell with Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova, translated from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali (Tilted Axis Press, 2024)

Book of the month: Kim Leine

December 23, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This novel was a recommendation from leading English-Danish translator Signe Lyng. After we met at the Dublin Book Festival in November, she generously sent me a list of recent Danish-language novels that she admires, including Niviaq Korneliussen’s Last Night in Nuuk and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.

One of Lyng’s suggestions stood out to me for two reasons: firstly, because it came out twelve years ago and so the English-language version was likely to fit my criteria of only featuring books published pre-2021 on this blog this year. Secondly, because Greenland is a big focus of the plot, and as anyone who knows about my admiration for the Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie will realise, Greenland is a place that particularly captures my imagination. (Indeed, 2025 promises to bring some exciting news on that front – watch this space!)

Kim Leine’s award-winning and bestselling The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, translated by Martin Aitken, tells the story of Morten Falch, an eighteenth-century Danish missionary who travels to Greenland to spread the gospel to the Inuit. Ambitious and earnest, yet riddled with doubts and secret desires (and fixated on Rousseau’s observation that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’), Falch finds himself tested in the colony’s harsh physical and social climate. Principles crumble in the face of insurmountable inequalities, corruption and human frailty, with gut-wrenching results.

This is a truly absorbing novel. One of those rare fat books you wish was even longer. The writing is at heart of this. There is a wonderful dexterity to Leine and Aitken’s prose, which takes us inside Morten’s most intimate thoughts (as well as those of a number of characters he encounters), laying bare his blind spots, idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities and desires.

Part of the work’s power comes from the attention to detail and physical sensations. The writing excels at delineating the minute shifts in power dynamics that accompany crucial moments and decisions, showing how easily things might turn in another direction, and yet simultaneously making us feel the inevitability of what transpires.

The most powerful example of this involves a protracted rape scene, which shows the ebb and flow of control, and captures the absurdity, humanity and even wrongheaded moments of tenderness, humour and connection in the midst of the cruelty and brutality being inflicted. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it feels,’ the attacker tells their victim at one point, revealing the self-deception underlying all the worst suffering depicted in the book. Leine presents a powerful anatomy of objectification, showing the way skewed power dynamics warp thinking, feeding off our struggle to conceive of others as having interior lives that are as rich and nuanced as our own.

Interestingly, the book starts with a brief translator’s note, explaining that using the third person pronoun to address someone was a feature of polite discourse in eighteenth-century Danish and that Aitken has chosen to retain it in the English version. This feels like a risky decision – distancing and potentially confusing. Yet Aitken makes it work, establishing a new variant of formal speech that quickly feels natural to the world of the novel. This and the numerous virtuosic descriptions and assertions often couched in deceptively simple terms are testament to the skill of this writer-translator pair.

Take my favourite line, used to describe an infested mattress on the ship on which Morten sails: ‘The lice seep forth like water.’ How horrifyingly marvellous is that? It captures the action so simply and so precisely. You can see the lice rising out of the fibres. It is absolutely the right formulation to bring that moment to life. And if I sat at my desk for half a year it would never occur to me.

And of course it is in this ingenuity, this care, this attention to detail, that the hope of this majestic novel lies. Because although he depicts characters enchained by their own perspectives and desires, Leine reveals by the world he creates for us that we can transcend our small, partial viewpoints. We can look further, we can feel beyond the boundaries of our own experience. The best storytelling allows us to to do this. And it is by making this possible that books like The Prophets of Eternal Fjord live beyond their moment.

And so I come to the end of my year of reading nothing new for this blog. What have I learnt? Well, although my other writing projects and work chairing events at literature festivals mean I haven’t been able only to read books published pre-2021, turning down the volume on the hype around newly published works over the past twelve months has proved instructive.

There are many books that make a big splash when they appear and there are others that echo more loudly with the passing of the years. Sometimes there is a correlation between the two, as with The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. But often books that are big when they come out fall away in time: many of the literary stars of previous eras are barely remembered now.

While big publishers have a fair bit of influence over which titles are visible at first, it is readers who dictate what will be remembered and what will speak beyond its moment. It is the books that stay with us, that we continue to recommend and return to that will live on.

This is exciting and encouraging. It means we all have a say in shaping our literary culture. And it means that small presses that don’t have the marketing fire power of the big houses may still produce work that finds a large audience and reverberates down the years.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their suggestions of older books that stay with them this year. Here’s to many more wonderful literary encounters (and a possible trip to Greenland) in 2025!

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Atlantic Books, 2016)

Picture: ‘Old Church in Upernavik’ by David Stanley on flickr.com

Book of the month: Angèle Rawiri

November 26, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This was a recommendation from Suroor Alikhan, who kindly invited me to be part of the Hyderabad Literature Festival Online series earlier this year and wrote about our event on her blog. Suroor is an extremely widely read person, so I knew when she suggested Gabonese author Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh, that it would be worth a look. As the translation came out in 2014, the book fell comfortably before the 2021 cut off I’ve set myself for my year of reading nothing new. I wasted no time in ordering it.

The novel follows Emilienne, a wealthy businesswoman in what we are told is a surprisingly progressive marriage according to the norms of her community. She is the major breadwinner and her husband – who, like her, studied in Paris – was present at the birth of their daughter Rékia and plays an active role in childcare. But all is not well, and when Rékia dies suddenly and violently, the tragedy exposes cracks in the family that threaten Emilienne’s very existence, plunging her into an identity crisis, and forcing her to confront the prejudices, inequalities and values underpinning her life.

It took me a while to understand quite how pioneering a book this is. Because the translation came out in 2014 and because the subject matter feels contemporary (involving a lot of reflection on secondary infertility and female sexuality, including a same-sex love affair), I had assumed the novel was relatively recent. It was only when the subject of AIDS came up some way into the narrative that I discovered it was first published in 1989.

Not only that, but Angèle Rawiri is widely credited with being Gabon’s first novelist, leading with Elonga, published in 1986. I’ve featured a number of trailblazing female writers lauded as their nations’ first published women on this blog over the years (among them Kunzang Choden and Paulina Chiziane), but it is rare to see a female writer named as a nation’s first published author.

Rawiri certainly seems to feel a duty to tackle national problems in her writing. Women’s rights take centre stage but many other political and social issues pass through her narrative too, among them corruption, the way workers become jaded in a capitalist system, and the legacy of colonialism. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Emilienne’s husband Joseph extolls the merits of a single-party system:

let’s have the courage to recognize that we are a selfish tribal people. Take a look at what is happening in the ministries and state-owned companies! First they hire a member of the family, regardless of their abilities, and, if they have none, they look among those around them from their own ethnic group. No, believe me, in order to have a real multiparty system, Africans are going to have to manage to place national interests above their own. In the meantime, the single-party system seems to be what we need. Let me explain: when a country is under the aegis of a single party, its nationals, whatever group they’re from, are forced to meet, discuss, and exchange their opinions about issues that concern them all. They don’t have the time to dwell on tribal issues. Collective motivations almost always win against frictions between individuals. Obviously, with such a political alliance, men learn how to tolerate one another, to love one another, and above all to work toward the same ideals. Isn’t that the goal sought by our leaders!

I don’t agree with Joseph (and I suspect Rawiri doesn’t either), but I’ve never seen the arguments for such a system put so persuasively before.

The passages that deal with female agency and reproductive rights are particularly arresting, and sometimes shocking. For all her professional status and qualifications, Emilienne finds herself at the mercy of a value system that judges women’s worth by their ability to bear children. When she struggles to conceive a second child, her social stock plummets and she is judged to be in need of a ‘cure’. (Indeed, at one stage we are told that a woman choosing not to have children would have to be ‘sick’ in the head.)

As with her presentation of the arguments for a single-party system, Rawiri makes the characters who express these views alarmingly persuasive. (Indeed, were it not for the dedication of the novel to a friend who struggled to conceive, it would sometimes be tempting to think the author’s sympathies lie with them.) In this, the work recalls the brilliant One Part Woman, reviewed on this blog last year.

The novel presents numerous challenges for a twenty-first century reader steeped in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Pacing, a perennial sticking point when stories cross borders, works differently: some apparently major issues are presented or resolved abruptly, while the narrative lingers on events that may seem relatively inconsequential to Western eyes. Some of the dialogue feels rather direct or on-the-nose, and the handling of sexual encounters works according to different norms and assumptions. I also found the choice (whether Rawiri’s or translator Hanaburgh’s) to withhold specific cultural terms a little distancing – referring to another community as ‘that ethnic group’ rather than by name or telling us that characters are speaking the ‘local language’ rather than giving us the word for it.

But this is distance worth travelling in order to experience this trailblazing literary work. Rawiri was not only dealing with challenging subject matter but also carving out a path for a new tradition, depicting places and people who had never been seen in novels before. When novelists like me sit down to write, we follow well-trodden paths, lined with countless examples of how the world around us might be depicted on the page. But although Rawiri may have had some exemplars in the work of Francophone African feminist writers like Mariama Bâ, no-one in her nation had put her surroundings into a published print story before. The scale of her ambition and achievement is extraordinary.

The Fury and Cries of Women (Fureurs et cris de femme) by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh (University of Virginia Press, 2014)

Dublin Book Festival

November 11, 2024 By in Events, Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

Last weekend, I had the privilege of being part of the line-up at Dublin Book Festival, an annual celebration of all things literary in Ireland’s capital. My event was a discussion of reading the world with Literature Ireland director Sinéad Mac Aodha (pictured with me above), who helped launch Crossing Over at Hodges Figgis last year. But I was lucky to attend several other things thanks to the Literature Ireland team, who took me under their wing for the weekend.

The first of these was the launch of Your Own Dark Shadow: A Selection of Lost Irish Horror Stories at the Gutter Bookshop.

I don’t consider myself a horror fan, but I was intrigued by what editor Jack Fennell said in his speech about how horror is a way of articulating the sense that something is wrong in the world and helping people to feel less alone in this. My fiction bears hallmarks of this, so I am intrigued to see how this plays out in the collection.

I was also deeply impressed by the ethos of the collection’s publisher, Tramp Press, one of a number of indie houses making strides in Ireland. Their submission window is open now, so if you live outside North America and are looking for somewhere to place work, I would recommend checking them out.

The next day I attended an event on short stories with Jan Carson and Mary Costello (pictured above). In the queue outside I was delighted to bump into debut novelist Alan Murrin, with whom I did an event earlier this year. His recommendation of Mary Costello’s story ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ was so enthusiastic that I lost no time in buying a copy of her latest collection.

The discussion in the event was illuminating and wide-ranging. Jan Carson talked about how word counts were coming down for many journals and competitions. ‘Watch yourself if you’re always writing to fit others’ requirements,’ she said. She explained that the way into stories for her is through concepts, and gave a brilliant example in the shape a story in her latest collection that was commissioned to explore how Northern Ireland is seen in the wake of Brexit. She had approached the subject by envisaging a baby drifting down a river separating the land of two farmer brothers who don’t get on.

Meanwhile, Mary Costello said that for her the spur to writing comes from thinking about the interior lives of her characters. It will often be physical exercise, whether walking or hoovering, that shakes problems loose in her work.

Next up was an event on the essay, chaired by Brendan Barrington, founder editor of The Dublin Review. I found this very inspiring. Over the hour-long discussion, in which panellists shared some of their favourite pieces from the publication, I was struck by the enthusiasm of these writers for this somewhat enigmatic form, and by their openness to people writing in several genres. ‘If you’re a serious writer and you don’t write an essay occasionally, you’re missing a trick,’ said Barrington at one point. I took this as a challenge. Watch this space.

My event was towards the end of the afternoon and it was wonderful to be greeted by an enthusiastic audience, featuring several familiar faces, among them author Rónán Hession, Africa Institute in Ireland programme director Adekunle Gomez and Lyndsey Fineran, who created my literary explorer role at Cheltenham Literature Festival and is now artistic director of the Auckland Writers Festival.

The discussions afterwards were particularly heartwarming. So many readers shared insights about how reading internationally connected to their experience, and I left with a list of book recommendations. I was also particularly delighted to make the acquaintance of translator Signe Lyng, who brings many of Ireland’s most well-known writers’ work into Danish. She subsequently sent me a list of Danish recommendations. I think I feel a book of the month coming on…

I left Dublin inspired and encouraged. What I’d shared in was an event founded on the belief that storytelling is valuable, not for the money it makes but because of the connections it forges – something that I hope also drives my work.

Irish writing has always had an important place on the international stage, and is perhaps enjoying a particularly powerful moment. At Dublin Book Festival, it was not hard to see why.