Greetings readers! Here are Our Top 5 Books of the Month from around the world to keep your mind sharp, your perspective fresh and to remind us all why cultural literacy matters more than ever.
The Ogre’s Daughter, Catherine Bardon Tr. Tina Kover
Flor de Oro was born in 1915 in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic. Her father rose from small-time gangster to dictator and ruthlessly ruled the country for three decades until his assassination in 1961.
El Jefe controlled his daughter with the same suffocating authoritarian grip with which he ruled the country. It is a toxic love and Flor struggles all her life to free herself from her father’s yoke, the father she both loves and loathes. She marries nine times and lives a restless peripatetic life, moving to France, Nazi Germany and the United States.
Catherine Bardon is a French writer who divides her time between France and the Dominican Republic. Her novel Les Déracinés (The Uprooted) sold over 600,000 copies and won numerous awards. The Ogre’s Daughter is her first novel to be translated into English.
BUY The Ogre’s Daughter Europa Editions
Dog Star, Nabarun Bhattacharya Tr. Subha Prasad Sanyal
Set in the underbelly of Calcutta, Dog Star is a dystopian allegory of power and oppression; vengeance, and human cruelty. The boundary between myth and reality is blurred as the city’s relationship with its abandoned animals is reimagined in a blend of dark humour and political critique. It is a provocative and haunting read.
Calcutta’s dogs, brutalized and unseen, rise in defiant revolt against their human oppressors. As the streets turn into battlegrounds, history bleeds through as echoes of past atrocities and ancient mythologies intertwine with the brutal immediacy of the present. The city itself is a character in this fable of resistance, as the story illuminates urban neglect and how modern cities treat their “outsiders” (animals, marginalised humans).
Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014) is a major figure in modern Bengali literature who worked as a journalist before devoting himself fully to writing. His novel Herbert (winner of the 1997 Sahitya Akademi Award) is considered a cult classic.
BUY Dog Star Seagull Books
The Duke, Matteo Melchiorre Tr. Antonella Lettieri
Outside Vallorgana, a small isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocrtic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?
Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.
BUY The Duke Foundry Editions
Sanderling, Anne Weber Tr. Neil Blackadder
How do you live with a past that won’t loosen its grip? What did it mean to be German a century ago, and what does it mean today? These questions underpin Sanderling, Anne Weber’s probing work of literary investigation as she unravels the contradictions of a man, and a nation, caught between ideals and ideology.
Anne Weber embarks on a journey into her family’s history, piecing together the life of her great-grandfather, Florens Christian Rang (1864–1924), whom she dubs “Sanderling” after the quick, elusive shorebird. A Protestant pastor in Prussian-controlled Poland, Rang served a church bent on “Germanising” the local population which would cast a long, dark shadow in the decades to come.
After abandoning the church, Sanderling gravitated toward the intellectual circles of Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Martin Buber. These writers, artists, and thinkers chased visions of a better world, even as one of Rang’s own sons, Weber’s grandfather, later embraced Nazism.
Drawing on thinkers from Sontag to Sebald to Nietzsche, she folds personal history into a wider meditation on ethics, memory, and responsibility in this a time-bending travelogue that looks back in order to better understand today.
BUY Sanderling Indigo Press
Yoko Tawada, Archipelago of the Sun Tr. Margaret Mitsutani
Archipelago of the Sun – the concluding volume of Yōko Tawada’s dystopian trilogy, comprising Scattered All Over the Earth (vol. 1) and Suggested in the Stars (vol. 2) – is set in the not-too-distant future, and is about friendship and climate change. Hiruko is still searching for her lost country, Japan, remembered as “the land of sushi”. She is travelling with her friends Knut, a Danish linguist; Akash, an Indian transitioning to the opposite sex; Nanook, a Greenlander who once worked as a sushi chef; Nora, the German woman who loves Nanook but is equally concerned with social justice and the environment; and Susanoo, a former sushi chef who believes he is responsible for the entire group. Suddenly decides to change their route, and encounter long dead writers (Witold Gombrowicz, Hella Wuolijoki) plus a cast of characters from literature, art, and myth. How will their journey continue?
“Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel … succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as ‘weightless gravity’,” Julian Lucas, The New Yorker
BUY Archipelago of the Sun Granta Books
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