Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour — in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.” Poor Teymour sits forlorn in a...
Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea of mythic images, protean characters and what the author...
I was eight when my father brought me to one of the big houses at the top of Esperanza Street and left me with Mary Morelos. ‘I haven’t the time to fix broken wings,’ she said. ‘Does he have any trouble with discipline?’ My father glanced...
The Sound of Things Falling - No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with...
Last Evenings On Earth - "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolaño's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and...
Set in 1960, this novel tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian — German...
Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “almost magical capacity for literary time travel” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set...