translated from French by Anna Moschovakis My two granddads fought in World War One, my maternal granddad in Belgium, my paternal granddad in Iraq (where he died; there’s a Memorial at Basra commemorating him and the other 40,000 casualties of the Mesopotamia campaign). A generation on, my dad fought in World War Two in North … More At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
When my brother became a vegetarian in his teens it caused a bit of a flap. This was the mid-1970s, we lived on a council estate in Liverpool, and the nearest we’d got to vegetarianism was eating fish on Fridays. So to find we were living with someone who’d stopped eating meat was like being … More The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)
Have you heard of The Satanic Verses? Probably, yes, if only because of the furore following its publication: accusations of blasphemy and a fatwa against the author, Salman Rushdie. And The Comforts of Madness? I’d guess not; at the specialist second-hand bookshop where I found my copy, the staff recognised neither the book nor the … More The Comforts of Madness by Paul Sayer
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