Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

A quietly devastating, but absolutely riveting, book. It begins with the suicide of a woman stricken with grief over her daughter’s disappearance, intertwining her story with those of her remaining children, and that of a young pregnant woman who witnesses her leap into the sea. It’s a brilliantly unsettling story. The city is never named,ContinueContinue reading “The Singularity, Balsam Karam, tr. Saskia Vogel”

This is a remarkable book about the difficulties of understanding King Lear, and also 20th-century Chinese history. It turns out that thinking about them alongside each other is both illuminating and clarifying. Not in the sense that anything is totally explained, but rather that some of the strangeness is distilled; it becomes possible to articulateContinueContinue reading “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, Nan Da”

This is a real slow burn of a novel. Very short (only 116 pages!) but it feels like a gradual buildup, layering different perspectives and moments in time. It was a fascinating contrast to another novel I read recently and was blown away by, Mikołaj Grynberg’s Poufne: both are stories of multiple generations, and howContinueContinue reading “Years and Years, Hwang Jungeun, tr. Janet Hong”

This is terrific — wry, bristly, surprising. It’s a story about a woman, the titular Sister Deborah (though she will prove to have many names throughout the book) who comes to Rwanda from the US and gains a reputation as a miracle worker, unsettling local power dynamics. It’s also the story of a woman whoContinueContinue reading “Sister Deborah, Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Mark Polizotti”

August is Women in Translation month (aka #WiTMonth), which I am a big fan of, so I meant to only post about books in translation by women, or translated by women, but I also have a bit of a backlog of books I’m finished and haven’t written about so best laid plans, etc. I boughtContinueContinue reading “Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie”

I read this in one sitting on a long flight and it was very satisfying. Mrs Dalloway is one of my all-time favorite novels so I am quite leery of re-tellings, but this one is effective, precisely because it doesn’t cleave too closely to the original (if you didn’t know, you might not even thinkContinueContinue reading “The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon”

What I kept thinking as I read this was man, Adichie really despises academics, and has a special place of rage reserved for ‘woke’ African American scholars. She is absolutely vicious skewering the hypocrisy and self-congratulatory elitism of Americans lecturing Africans about race. And while some of the critique is no doubt valid, it readsContinueContinue reading “Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”

Some 3/4 of the way through this book, Chihaya talks about reading other memoirs about depression, and says “Even now I find the genre difficult to face. After encountering Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation in college and feeling affronted both by how like and how utterly unlike it was to my experience of adolescence, I whollyContinueContinue reading “Bibliophobia, Sarah Chihaya”

I knew almost nothing about this before listening to the audiobook (the narrator is perfect), which meant that I could fully experience the gradual build-up of horror. It’s a terrifying book, all too true to our historical moment. But it’s made bearable by Smith’s trademark delight in language, and by something that is not hopeContinueContinue reading “Gliff, Ali Smith”

I saw this on a few Best Of lists last year and was semi intrigued, and then a friend of mine posted about hating it and a few people chimed in, and then I was even more intrigued, and checked out the audiobook. And to my surprise, I found it extremely interesting! It reads likeContinueContinue reading “Good Material, Dolly Alderton”