A literary and cultural blog dedicated to book reviews, literary travel, art, museums, and thoughtful reading across borders and cultures.
Journey to the Edge of Life by the Turkish writer, Tezer Özlü is one of those books that feels less like a novel and more like being invited into someone’s restless, searching mind. Originally written in German and later translated into Turkish and reshaped by Özlü herself, the book sits […]
Jurica Pavičić’s Red Water is a powerful and unsettling novel that combines a crime narrative with a profound meditation on moral ambiguity, collective trauma, and historical rupture. Set on the Dalmatian coast, the novel centres on the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl, Silva, in the late 1980s, on the eve […]
“Once I left the country of my childhood, I realised those differences were everywhere: in the shape of the street furniture and the painted lines by the side of the road, the strength and colour of the light cast by the streetlamps or the sound of the ambulance sirens as […]
“It seemed to him that a story told, a story from the past, would never truly fade once it had moved someone. The act of remembering, of reading, was like a return, a homecoming into a story. He was never closer to himself than in the remembered and read.” “…that […]
“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from […]
Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis is a deeply reflective and thoughtful novel with subtle elements of magical realism and a dreamlike atmosphere exploring themes of isolation, loneliness, solitude, the invisibility of people, their emotional displacement from the past, the impact of history on one’s life, the relationship between the […]
A few weeks ago I visited Torquay. One day I decided to walk along South West Coast Path from Babbacombe via Long Quarry Point, Ansteys Cove, Brandy Cove, Meedfoot Beach, London Bridge Arch and finally reaching Torquay. This video includes images from that walk along South West Coast Path. I […]
During my time in Greece I took a ferry to Hydra island – a place of solitude, a place which inspired Leonard Cohen and where he found solace in the late 1960s, where Henry Miller found inspiration in the 1930s and where Sandra Cisneros finished The House of Mango Street […]
Published in 1989, a haunting novella Sweet Days of Discipline by the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy tells a story of a nameless distant protagonist, an adolescent female reminiscing nostalgically about her teenage years in an oppressive boarding school located in post-WW2 Switzerland. In her book, Jaeggy explores the meaning of […]
“The beginning of a great journey has become a gentle, untroubled memory, like a dream you need not fear and do not lose.” All the Roads Are Open: An Afghan Journey (1939–40) by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) is an account of a trip that Schwarzenbach undertook with a fellow traveller and journalist […]