Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother Translator Geoffrey Strachan (French) Graywolf Press, 2011 A Graywolf Press publication, a contender for The Tournament of Books, with a gorgeous and haunting cover image: all excellent reasons for picking up a copy of The Last Brother without reading a single word. And then you meet
What makes for a love letter during the Cultural Revolution in China would have Heathcliff and Catherine shaking their heads. Maybe two or three pages of discussing China's excellent international and domestic circumstances, then the fortunate conditions of provincial and city life, and those of friends and class-mates. These formalities
Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart (1973) Trans. J. Tate Illus. Ilon Wikland (1984) Everybody knows Pippi Longstocking, but not so many readers know The Brothers Lionheart. I read it on the advice of a reading friend, who counts it amongst her favourite children's books. And then I learned that it's also one of Iris' special
The Time In Between is essential reading for those who thought that reading about the Spanish Civil War meant Hemingway and Orwell. In her lush and sprawling novel, María Dueñas presents the era via the perspective of "an independent woman in difficult times". There was no room for a seamstress like
Some reading months are just really exciting, right? That's my January 2012. Some of the thrills are pretty specific. For instance, my First Amazing Read of 2012, Edem Awumey's Dirty Feet (House of Anansi, 2011); I actually read it twice in January. Whenever I finish a book with that "Must
