Following the success of the first season of the BookBlast® Translation Book Club at Hatchards, Piccadilly, we are thrilled to announce the titles up for discussion this coming Autumn. We will meet as usual on the second Monday of each month at 6 p.m.
So for your calendars, the following meetings and books are as follows:
Mon Sept 9 Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugresic (Author) Celia Hawkesworth (Translator) Canongate
“Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a mirthlessly witty divertimento on female old age. Ugrešic’s meta-narrative sings with intelligence; its cryptic weirdness challenges the reader. Set in the splintered aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia, its persons inhabit a borderline between tragedy and farce,” The Independent
Mon Oct 14 Warsaw Tales, Helen Constantine (Editor) Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator) OUP Published 12 Sep 2024
A collection of twelve stories set in twentieth century Warsaw written by various authors, including Nobel prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk whose story Che Guevara has never been published in English before, Warsaw Tales is structured chronologically from 1911 when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire to the end of the century with its status as capital of an independent nation.
Mon Nov 11 Clara Reads Proust, Stéphane Carlier (Author) Polly Mackintosh (Translator) Gallic
“A 23-year-old hairdresser casually picks up a copy of Swann’s Way left behind by a client – only to find the novel taking over her life . . . Clara Reads Proust is a book of great charm and quiet distinction. Its brevity, uncluttered sentences and discrete paragraphs could not be further from Proust’s style,” The Spectator
Mon Dec 9 A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare (Author) John Hodgson (Translator) Vintage Classics
The phone call is made in 1934 by the tyrant Joseph Stalin to the writer Boris Pasternak about a third writer, Osip Mandelstam, who has been arrested, lasting just a few minutes. Ismail Kadare’s novel, A Dictator Calls, imagines what might have happened next. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
View YouTube Book Club season 1
Hatchards Events
Please see separate Eventbrite posts for tickets.
Tickets for the translation book club evenings include £5 off the purchase of any one of the titles.
