Best Books I’ve Read So Far This Year
At the halfway point of 2023, here are the highlights of my reading year so far, including a Saudi Arabian novel, a history of Algeria and an Australian masterpiece.
Reading Roundup for September 2022
The month started with my favourite novel of the year and continued to produce excellent reads—read on for my recommendations.
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 a week, which is OK for me. It was a busy year in many ways, and I didn’t…
Literature and Empathy
As a (very) part-time journalist, I get inundated with press releases, most of which I delete. But one email subject line today caught my eye: “Step into the shoes of a migrant in the UK with groundbreaking audio experience.” In…
Representation Matters
Diversity in children’s books is a real problem. Here are a couple of statistics for you, courtesy of The Bookseller: 32.1% of pupils of compulsory school age in England are of minority ethnic origins. Only 4% of all the children’s…
Help fund a new piece of collaborative refugee fiction
Help fund a Kickstarter campaign for Shatila Stories, a collaborative piece of fiction by nine refugee writers from the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon.
Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika
I read this book back in the spring, before it got shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and got a fair bit of attention. But, as you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t been blogging very regularly, so I’m only writing about it now.…
Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda
Peirene Press is known for publishing contemporary European literature in translation, but its latest offering takes us a little further afield, to Tripoli in the 1960s. Author Kamal Ben Hameda lives in Holland and writes in French, but this novella is set…