A literary and cultural blog dedicated to book reviews, literary travel, art, museums, and thoughtful reading across borders and cultures.
There are people who live at the edges of things, outside the centre of society, outside conventional ideas of success, belonging and respectability. They may be economically marginalised, socially isolated, geographically displaced, or simply unable to find a comfortable place within the world around them. These are novels about such […]
There is a particular melancholy that belongs to autumn, the feeling of time passing, of places becoming memories, of light slowly withdrawing from the world. The books on this list share that particular autumnal melancholy. Some take us through lonely cities and quiet rooms; others turn towards paintings, museums, memory […]
Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell explores existential despair through the nature of eternity, the limits of human meaning and the place of the individual within an incomprehensibly vast universe. After discovering that he has chosen the wrong religion, Soren is sent to Hell, which takes the form […]
Written in 1967, during the height of the Cold War and amid the growing possibility of nuclear confrontation, Termush by the Danish writer Sven Holm is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a group of survivors who have bought their place at Termush, a luxury resort designed to serve as a […]
Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, is an unsettling novel about the impossibility of leaving completely: of escaping a country, a political ideal, a family, a war, or even a history that has already become part of who we are. Énard brings together two stories […]
I took this video below during my trip to Paris this summer, a day of gardens, artists, forgotten lives and the quiet pleasures of simply sitting beneath the trees in the grounds of the Parisian museum with an iced coffee. I began at the Petit Palais, wandering through its beautiful […]
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgård is a deeply personal meditation on Edvard Munch’s art and on why paintings affect us. Knausgård writes in his characteristically introspective style, moving between Munch’s paintings and reflections on memory, death, loneliness, love, creativity, […]
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group is one of the most powerful accounts of contemporary Afghanistan because it tells history through the voices of women living through political catastrophe. Created by twenty-one Afghan women brought together by the organisation Untold Narratives, the […]
The Wonders, by Spanish writer Elena Medel, is a lyrical and deeply moving novel that examines how class, gender, money, and history shape the lives of working-class women across generations in Spain, from the second half of the twentieth century into the first half of the twenty-first century. Through the […]
Francisco Goldman’s The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle is a memoir that blends personal grief, travel writing, journalism, and political commentary. Part travelogue and part reportage on Mexican politics and narco-violence, the book follows Goldman several years after the tragic death of his wife, the writer Aura Estrada, as […]