As I write this review, The Dishwasher by Stephane Laure, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss was named winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award just a few days ago. A prize devoted to first-time novelists only, it’s a highly-coveted way of...
True crime is so hot right now. I’ve been reading a few and enjoying the experience, so I thought I’d jump right into the trend and compare two that had been begging for attention on my bookshelf. Both of these books are SO DIFFERENT, yet they both deal...
Are you a fan of ‘noir fiction’ ? Do you even know what ‘noir’ means? There are various definitions for it, but I found this wikipedia listing pretty thorough, and the first sentence does enough for my purposes here: “In its modern form,...
Written by the “grand dame of Dutch literature”, Sleepless Night by Margriet de Moor is 122 pages of reminiscing and remembrance. Translated from the Dutch by David Doherty, it follows a widow over one sleepless night as she bakes a Bundt cake in the dead of winter,...
I try to avoid reviewing two or more novels in one post because I like to give each author their due, but these two books were begging to be compared against one another, and quite frankly, I’m reading so much these days that keeping up with my book reviews is...
I think this book may be the most ‘masculine’ thing I have ever read, except for maybe a GQ magazine article about belts. The Plotters by Un-Su Kim, translated into English by Sora Kim-Russell features men, lots of men, and they’re either fighting,...