Pale, freckled eggs. With those 3 words, begins The Conservationist, an epic story that highlights the controversy of ownership and the complexity of race relations in South Africa during the period of apartheid. Nobel Prize winning author, Nadine Gordimer introduces a scene where the absentee farmer Mehring is on his way to visit his landholding,…
Tag: Man Booker Prize
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin | Book Review 124/2019
Fever Dream is told as part remembrance and part dialogue between a dying woman named Amanda and the ghostly presence of her neighbor’s son, David, who is trying to get her to understand how she got to be lying in a hospital bed, suffering from what feels like worms moving through her body. Some of…
G. by John Berger | Book Review 34/2019
G. is the aptly titled winner of the 1972 Booker Prize winner by novelist, John Berger, who is probably better known as an art critic. In a unique combination of this two artistic representations, the novel is rendered in flickers and strokes, and layers of meaning some of which emerge as images and some of…
2019 Man Booker Prize Reading Challenge | #ManBooker51
Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize and the committee hosted #ManBooker50 which was a challenge to read all previous winners. I tried and failed to read all the books in the calendar year so this year, I thought I would try again, but this time, I am reading all the…
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh | Book Review
Grace, Lia and Sky are sisters living with their (otherwise unnamed) Mother and their father, King, on a remote island, far enough away to protect the women from a toxic environment that threatens their very survival. King, as their protector and intermediary between them and this other world, he alone returns periodically for supplies, proving…
Man Booker 2018 Shortlist
In the past two or three years, the Man Booker Prize has become my favorite literary prize. I don’t always love the winning books but I admire the controversy that their judging process invites since they post a “long list” of finalists (this year that included these 13 books) and after a few weeks, they…
5 Star Predictions
Have you ever watched a movie or read a book that you knew you were going to love even before you started watching/reading it? One movie I knew I was going to love even before the opening credits started was the Oscar nominated foreign language film, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin, or simply Amélie. Amelie is…
We Need New Names
Her name is Darling and along with her friends – Bastard, Godknows, Soho, Chipo, Stina – they roam the streets of Paradise, a cluster of tin shacks erected when their real houses were razed to contract mines or whatever else foreigners say to justify ousting Africans from their homes to accommodate what they call progress. Together, these…
An Honor To Be Nominated
I have a friend whose criteria for buying books is that they have that little magic line stamped at the top of the cover that says – NY Times Bestseller. It’s a great plan, I think. For me, I’m always on the lookout for the sticker that says the book was nominated for or won an…
