August 2020 Reading Roundup
After my quick trip to the UK last month, I’m back in Belgrade again. We made a few stops on our drive back across Europe, but it’s really not a good time to be travelling. It was, nevertheless, a great…
The Unsaintly Side of Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi is one of those people whose position as a hero of history is assured. He overcame the most powerful empire on earth with the power of nonviolence. He is immortalised through his quotable epigrams like “Be the change…
July 2020 Reading Roundup
I’m writing this in the middle of a two-week quarantine in the UK. Don’t worry, I don’t have any Covid-19 symptoms—it’s just a precaution for people arriving from certain “high-risk” countries. Why the UK (with 46,000 deaths) is quarantining people…
Children of the Cave: A Fascinating Finnish Novel of Ideas
In Children of the Cave, Finnish writer Virve Sammalkorpi imagines an encounter between a group of explorers and some strange creatures living in a cave in the remote forests of northern Russia that look like animals but also have some…
May 2020 Reading Roundup
The COVID-19 lockdown here in Belgrade was very strict in March and April, but this month it ended, and things are more or less back to normal now. The cafes, shops and restaurants are all open again, and there’s rarely…
April 2020 Reading Roundup
In a short time, I've gone from travelling full-time to being under strict lockdown in a Belgrade apartment. Perhaps that's why I've spent the month travelling through the world of books, from the Russian wilderness to a still-divided Germany and…
In the Name of Truth by Viveca Sten
In the Name of Truth by Swedish writer Viveca Sten is a well-plotted, intriguing crime novel whose central event is the disappearance of an eleven-year-old boy from a sailing camp on a sandy island in the Stockholm Archipelago.
March 2020 Reading Roundup
Overall, it was a very good month of reading for me. Books, as usual, were the lifeboats I ran for when things got tough outside.
Amora by Natalia Borges Polesso: Review
Amora won several major literary prizes when it was first published in Brazil several years ago, and having just got my hands on the soon-to-be-published English translation, I can see why. The short stories in this collection by Natalia Borges…