A Most Curious Fable!

Lake of Urine: A Love Story by Guillermo Stitch To be honest, when originally offered a review copy of this novel some months ago, I nearly turned it down because of its title alone – which is so bizarre and off-putting, but there was something in the summary on the press release that nabbed me: Read More

A modern morality tale

Strike Your Heart by Amélie Nothomb Translated by Alison Anderson Belgian author Nothomb writes taut novellas about flawed heroines that are always interesting (see here and here) and they always read like fables or fairy tales in one sense or another, despite being resolutely modern. Her newest, published last autumn is no different in that Read More

An Economic Allegory?

This post was republished in its original place in my blog’s timeline from my lost post archive.   The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse by Iván Repila Translated by Sophie Hughes At 110 pages, this short novel in the Pushkin Press Collection is easily read in one session. Once grabbed by this powerful story I 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

Sisters are doing it …

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman Elv, Claire and Meg Story are sisters.  They’re extremely close, inventing a language all of their own – Arnish – even their mother is excluded from their fantasy world, and the younger two are always rapt with Elv’s storytelling about the fairy land of Arnelle.  Theirs is a world full Read More

There’s a whole Hydden world out there …

Hyddenworld: Spring by William Horwood Back in the early 1980s, I read Horwood’s bestselling animal fantasy about moles – Duncton Wood.  I remember enjoying it immensely, but never read the sequels, and I can’t remember what it was really about apart from religion and war in mole-dom. But it was remembering the enjoyment of the former that Read More