Difference between revisions of "Forthcoming Publications"

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'''11 FEBRUARY'''
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'''26 FEBRUARY'''
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Eowyn Ivey
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|author=Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)
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|title=Black Woods Blue Sky
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|title=The Disappearing Act
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|rating=3.5
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|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
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|summary=''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, a strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he has a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Without realising it, this calling will transform hers and Emaleen's lives forever.
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|summary=Despite her anonymisation of place names and people, Stepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the town of F for a literary festival she is to be a guest speaker at. Detoured by erratic train schedules and nudged by forces beyond her control, her journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. Swept up in this series of events, M eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who has unexpectedly left the show. The train functions as a motif of transience and impermanence, while the circus embodies the reshaping of identity and a retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the very heart of the novel form itself.
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|isbn=1472279042
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|isbn=1804272329
 
}}
 
}}
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'''13 MARCH'''
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'''9 APRIL'''
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Mary McCarthy
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|author=Polly Barton
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|title=Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
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|title=What Am I, A Deer?
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
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|genre=Autobiography
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|genre=Literary Fiction
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|summary=Mary McCarthy describes herself as an ''amateur architect'', obsessively digging into the past to piece together the broken mosaic of her life. She attributes her ''burning interest in the past'' to her orphanhood, as she lacked any second-hand memories from her parents, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. This memoir chronicles her early years, beginning with her orphanhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she lived under the harsh guardianship of her late father's Irish Catholic parents and her abusive Uncle Myers and Aunt Margaret. Later, she moved to Seattle to live with her maternal grandparents—her grandmother being Jewish and her grandfather Presbyterian—who provided her with a different kind of upbringing.
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|summary=Polly Barton's debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and governing metaphor. The narrator, newly relocated from London to Berlin, works translating video games into Japanese through the process of localisation, rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to a new audience. Barton treats this as a paradoxical act: arguably, in striving for universality, language is endlessly repackaged, its originality at risk of disappearing altogether. From this, the novel opens out into a wider, resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in order to be understood, accepted, or loved?
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|isbn=1804271659
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|isbn=1804272175
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}}
 
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'''10 APRIL'''
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey (Translator)
 
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|title=The Accidentals
 
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|rating=4.5
 
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|genre=Short Stories
 
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|summary=This collection was truly enchanting in all senses of the word: spellbinding with its fantastical, magical elements and charming in its gentle portrayal of nature and human relationships. Guadalupe Nettel writes intelligently and precisely, her stories structured by a wisdom that appears to want to teach us something about the world.
 
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|isbn=1804271470
 
 
}}
 
}}

Latest revision as of 10:15, 8 February 2026

26 FEBRUARY

1804272329.jpg

Review of

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Despite her anonymisation of place names and people, Stepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the town of F for a literary festival she is to be a guest speaker at. Detoured by erratic train schedules and nudged by forces beyond her control, her journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. Swept up in this series of events, M eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who has unexpectedly left the show. The train functions as a motif of transience and impermanence, while the circus embodies the reshaping of identity and a retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the very heart of the novel form itself. Full Review

9 APRIL

1804272175.jpg

Review of

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Polly Barton's debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and governing metaphor. The narrator, newly relocated from London to Berlin, works translating video games into Japanese through the process of localisation, rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to a new audience. Barton treats this as a paradoxical act: arguably, in striving for universality, language is endlessly repackaged, its originality at risk of disappearing altogether. From this, the novel opens out into a wider, resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in order to be understood, accepted, or loved? Full Review

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