2023-06-27 10:45
“No other change in life demands so much in return,” writes the unnamed narrator in Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones (2022, tr: Jacob Rogers, 2023). The change in questi… Read More
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Booklit | A Literary Handout Blog
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A collection of book reviews spanning contemporary, classic, and world fiction.
2023-06-17 10:44
Andy Hamilton is a well-kent name from British TV and radio, having given us, among other things, shows like Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-1998) and Outnumbered (2007-2016). Longhand (2020) is… Read More
2023-06-03 10:37
In 1859 Jules Verne left France for the first time and visited Scotland. He looked over Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat (his first ‘mountain’), visited Glasgow, and took the t… Read More
2023-05-14 21:39
I’ll Do Anything You Want (2013, tr: Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent, 2023) by Iolanda Batallé is the tale of Nora, a painter who, after twenty-five years in a regular… Read More
2023-05-09 08:25
When we first meet the eponymous character of Maithreyi Karnoor’s debut, Sylvia (2021) she’s a freelance travel writer working on an article about baobab trees in India. These tr… Read More
2023-03-11 10:00
In an age of wearable and smart technology John’s Eyes (2021), a novella by Joanna Corrance, imagines a near future where eyes can be wholly replaced with artificial versions. This isn… Read More
2023-01-27 10:00
Thomas Hinde was the pen name of Sir Thomas Chitty, novelist for thirty years before ditching fiction for books on English country gardens and other pastoral pursuits. The Day the Call Came… Read More
2023-01-10 11:00
If James Herbert’s debut The Rats was a flawed horror classic, then his follow-up, The Fog (1975), seemed to right some of those wrongs while serving up more of the same. It’s a… Read More
2023-01-02 11:00
When James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) arrived on the scene, it must have felt like a massive fuck you to much that had gone before. Regular anthologies of ghost stories harked to a pre… Read More
2022-11-15 12:00
The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (2022) is the first of an unknown number by Jacob Kerr set in Northalbion, a fictional spin on Northumberland. Set over 1962, it’s a mostly enchanting tal… Read More
2022-11-04 13:02
What Will It Take For Me To Leave (2019, tr: Kat Storace, 2021) by Loranne Vella is one of the first offerings from Maltese specialists Prasper Press. It’s a set of short stories… Read More
2022-11-03 09:40
Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris (2005) is an epic fantasy but also, unlike much in this vein, a standalone. I’d be lying if it weren’t the major appeal in choosing this over t… Read More
2022-10-28 13:48
It only takes two mirrors to build a labyrinth, said Borges, and in The Carnivorous Plant (2021, tr: Laura McGloughlin, 2022) metaphorical mirrors are hung “in front, behind, above and… Read More
2022-10-09 13:51
Attention (for those of us who hadn’t been looking that way) turns to Annie Ernaux after her Nobel Prize win and to the body of work that got her there. A Man’s Place (1983, tr:… Read More
2022-09-19 13:00
The Pinochet years continue to inspire Chilean writers and Space Invaders (2013, tr: Natasha Wimmer, 2019) by Nona Fernández is one further addition to that canon. Here it’s a s… Read More
2022-09-18 16:38
The story behind The Lost Words (2017) by Robert MacFarlane, and illustrated by Jackie Morris, is a sad one for lovers of language whose childhood was steeped in nature. In the mid-noughties… Read More
2022-09-15 16:43
The opening dedication of Stephen King’s latest novel suggests where his mind was at: “Thinking of REH, ERB, and, of course, HPL.”, the initials calling to mind authors of… Read More
2022-08-29 08:46
In Oh William! (2021), the third book of Elizabeth Strout’s ongoing Amgash series, she returns to Lucy Barton as memoirist. While the first novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), introd… Read More
2022-08-11 08:53
Anything is Possible (2017) is a welcome return to the world of Lucy Barton, narrator of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton. More of a companion piece, this is a series of nine… Read More
2021-02-06 01:06
Just as the Roman Empire declined, the Galactic Empire is facing its own obsolescence after more than twelve thousand years. Beyond that humanity faces a new Dark Age spanning thirty thousan… Read More
2021-02-01 00:34
Memories of an Albanian childhood supply the collection of vignettes that amount to Ornela Vorpsi’s debut, The Country Where No One Ever Dies (2005), translated from the Italian by Rob… Read More
2021-01-28 02:00
There’s an old Persian myth about a black stone that, when confessed to, absorbs and absolves, until the day comes when it can take no more and explodes. This is The Patience Stone (20… Read More
2021-01-25 16:30
By the time she was ten years old Tove Ditlevsen knew she wanted to be a poet. The biggest obstacle to that dream was the times in which she lived. Born in 1917, the best her family could ho… Read More
2021-01-22 00:00
The unnamed husband in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Key (1956, tr. Howard Hibbett, 1960) has long maintained a diary, though as he opens his first entry for the new y… Read More
2021-01-19 00:33
Danish writer Peter Adolphsen‘s first work in English was his 2006 novel, Machine, which followed a drop of oil over the massive expanse of fifty-five million years, and somehow wrappe… Read More
2021-01-16 01:43
“Having never seen them, I can only imagine them” is how David Albahari’s narrator opens on the subject of Götz and Meyer, two non-commissioned officers, in this 1998… Read More
2021-01-13 00:00
Ghosts, creaky old mansions, seances, and the 1970s, are the surface level features of The Apparition Phase (2020), the debut novel from Will Maclean, a ghost story that straddles the line b… Read More
2021-01-10 00:00
The passage of fifty-five millions years sounds extremely epic, but here, in Peter Adolphsen’s Machine (2006, tr. Charlotte Barslund, 2007) that passage in time is compressed into the… Read More
2021-01-07 00:00
Despite existing in some literary middle ground between short story collection and novel, Jim Crace’s debut, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His encore, The Gift… Read More
2021-01-04 00:00
“Where does something begin?” is the opening line to Kerstin Ekman’s The Dog (1986, tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright, 2009), and it seems at first a silly question. Wh… Read More
2021-01-01 00:00
While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like his others… Read More
2018-01-02 17:39
Technology in the early twenty-first century is changing our lives — the way we do tasks; how we interact with friends; how we meet potential partners. The rise of Big Data, assi… Read More
2010-06-18 09:05
“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real myste… Read More
2009-11-08 23:00
In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off a series of rip… Read More
2009-10-19 07:00
Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by judges o… Read More
2009-10-13 07:00
With the impact of recognising Herta Müller as the 2009 Nobel laureate in literature slightly dampened by rising expectations that she would be the recipient I find myself still happy… Read More
2009-10-08 07:00
The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness – I don’t know how well known he is in the States – but a smal… Read More
2009-07-31 04:00
Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member of the Scribl… Read More
2009-07-28 00:17
Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel proper and still his… Read More
2009-07-22 10:04
It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth centur… Read More
2009-07-19 19:53
It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translatio… Read More
2009-07-03 06:48
A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, a… Read More
2009-06-29 23:25
The Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, is probably best known for writing short stories, a few collections of which have seen translation. Typically the stories are very short, no more than a few… Read More
2009-06-24 23:00
I‘ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra… Read More
2009-06-15 23:00
Last year I enjoyed Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style, arguably his most famous book, although as narrative goes it was rather slight, being the same story told ninety-nine times in… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book stores had s… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real myste… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
The longlist for the 2010 Independent Foreign Ficton Prize has been announced, and it’s quite a small press friendly affair. As usual, titles under consideration were those translated… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (&ldq&hell…Read More
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