The chief source material for the guerrillas in this tale is the life of ‘Michael X’ (born Michael de Freitas, of mixed race, in Trinidad of a Portuguese father). (Michael X – Wikipedia) Adopting a black Muslim identity, de Freitas worked in London as a thug for Peter Rachman. Then, seeing the incontrovertible truth of […]
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Graham Swift (Graham Swift – Literature) is a Booker Prize winning novelist. It was his novel ‘Last Orders’ that took the 1996 prize whilst also becoming the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. His novel Waterland (1983) won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both of these have been adapted for the screen,
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By 2024 it has been 71 years since the publication in 1953 of ‘The Adventures of Augie March‘ by Saul Bellow (Saul Bellow | US news | The Guardian). The book is still held up by many critics as a contender for the accolade of the great American novel. Augie March is Jewish in Chicago
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Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen-name Stendhal, wrote this novel at a pointless period in his life, during fifty-three days late in 1838. He was serving at the time as a minor French official in Italy – the Consul at Civitavecchia. Beyle was a veteran of several Napoleonic campaigns and was one of the survivors
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Margaret Atwood (http://margaretatwood.ca/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood) has been much in the news for her latest book ‘The Testaments’, the joint winner of The Man Booker Prize 2019. If you are new to this top rank author, I’d recommend Atwood at the height of her powers in her 1996 novel ‘Alias Grace’. There’s nothing like the spectacle of female
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Long on the ‘to do’ list for reading fiction, I’m delighted to have completed Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/06/fiction.impacprize) over the Easter break 2018. An American novelist and short story writer, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this novel in 2003. Not many multi-generational American novels are narrated by an omniscient hermaphrodite. Cal Stephanides
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Long on the ‘to do’ reading list, I’m delighted finally to have read Bel Canto (2001) by Ann Patchett (http://www.annpatchett.com/) this Easter 2018. The novel was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In December 1996, 14 members of the Tupac Amaru guerrilla group entered the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, seized
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John Berger (5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/30/john-berger-at-90-interview-storyteller) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), was written as an accompaniment to a BBC series intended as a response to the broadcast of ‘Civilisation’ by Kenneth Clark. It has been highly influential, and often prescribed
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino) describes Venice in the guise of a succession of 55 exotic and remote cities. It is an elegy placed in the mouth of Venetian traveller Marco Polo as he converses with emperor Kublai Khan. Venice is disguised as the city of ‘Hypatia’, where you expect to find beauty but instead
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