Shulem Deen’s Powerful Memoir of Hasidic Life
All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen is a powerful account of the author’s escape from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect known as…
2019: My Year of Full-Time Travel
As regular readers may know, I’ve been travelling full-time with my wife Genie since the beginning of 2015. We don’t have a…
Best Books I Read in 2019
How was your reading year? I read 58 books overall, which was not as many as I’d hoped, but still about one…
Inside the Syrian Conflict With Jonathan Littell
Homs is one of those places that, like Aleppo and Kandahar and Mosul, has become a byword for suffering. For years it…
German Literature Month: The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz
German Literature Month happens every November, and usually I remember about it some time in December. This year, though, I’m taking part…
October Reading Roundup
It’s been a busy couple of months for me, driving across Europe and along the Black Sea coast of Turkey, and now exploring Georgia,…
The Good Life Elsewhere: A Dark Moldovan Comedy of Migration
To describe The Good Life Elsewhere by Moldovan writer Vladimir Lorchenkov as a comedy is slightly misleading. It’s certainly shot through with black humour and…
Read to Your Children. They’ll Thank You for It
It’s International Literacy Day today, and I’d like to talk about fostering a love of reading. Recent research by Egmont shows that…
August Reading Roundup
How was your reading month? I had a good one, recovering from my slump in July and making some great discoveries. Here…