The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Dusapin is a Franco-Korean author who won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Lit for her first novel Winter in Sokcho, which followed the life of a young woman working at a hotel at the town near the Korean Read More
Tag: Mabinogion
#TDiRS22 – The Dark is Rising Sequence Book 4: The Grey King
A bit later than originally planned, but I hope you’re still with me as we come to the fourth of the five books in Susan Cooper’s wonderful children’s adventure fantasy series, The Grey King, published in 1975. Catch up with the previous posts here: Introduction Over Sea, Under Stone The Dark is Rising Greenwitch This Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion #5: The Tip of My Tongue by Trezza Azzopardi
The Wales Readathon, aka Dewithon is being hosted by Paula at Book Jotter. It’s running throughout March. Here is what I thought about my second Welsh read this month: Azzopardi was born in Cardiff to Welsh/Maltese parents. Her first novel The Hiding Place was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize and was set in the Maltese Read More
The Six Degrees of Separation Meme: Fates and Furies
Hosted each month by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, this meme picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six steps. (Here’s my one for last month.) This month the starting book is Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. Fates and Furies is a novel I’ve yet to read. If you look at the Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion #4
The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis. The Meat Tree is the fourth in the series of contemporary retellings of stories from the medieval Welsh story cycle The Mabinogion commissioned and published by Seren Books. See my reviews of the other titles in the series here and here. Gwyneth Lewis is an interesting author: firstly a poet, she has written a book-length poem about Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion #3
The Dreams of Max and Ronnie by Niall Griffiths See my previous post here for some background on this series of comtemporary retellings of the medieval Welsh story cycle the Mabinogion, and the first two titles in the sequence. The third book, The Dreams of Max and Ronnie to give its full title comprises two novellas based upon separate Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion: vols 1 & 2
The Mabinogion is a collection of medieval Welsh stories of Celtic origin – they are written very much in the bardic tradition of oral storytelling. The eleven tales as normally collected have the four ‘branches’ of the Mabinogion proper, a set of Native Tales and three Romances; the Native Tales also include early references to Read More
