The Shadow King

This much lauded by the literati work on the Ethiopian defeat of fascist Italy in the 1930s, through the lens of Ethiopian volunteer woman fighters, has a very good heart and tells a much neglected tale but fails on some key counts. I can see why it was Booker Prize shortlisted, because although wri......more

Now shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. “She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones” I bought this book as I felt (not least to the back cover blurb by Lemn Sissay) and had predicted that it had a very strong chance of making the 2020 Booker longlist. I started......more

Reading this, I remembered a line long time forgotten, but the line that has helped me to go through a lot when I was younger. I am not even sure where it is taken from. It might be from “King Lear” or it might be from "Mary Stuart" by Schiller. I cannot find it through the search as I know it only......more

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2020. What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no “what happened,” there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once. Every account of history is conditioned by a before and a......more

Violence is the language of power that is afraid. Maaza Mengiste, Festival degli Scrittori, 2015 In Celia Hawkesworth's Best Translated Book Award winning translation of Daša Drndić's novel E.E.G.: A Novel, the narrator and authorial alter ego, Andreas Ban meets, in Italy, a 'young Ethopian-American w......more