Jennifer Croft : The Extinction of Irena Rey

Eight translators make their seventh pilgrimage five miles to the Belarusian border to the home of the woman they refer to as Our Author. The translators are known by their languages: Serbian, Slovenian, English, and the narrator Spanish. Swedish is new, taking the place of Czech who, they are told, has died.

The Deceptagram

Stella Gibbons : Westwood

Stella Gibbons loved Highgate. She moved there in 1936 and lived there for the next forty-six years. This book is as much about Highgate as it is about Margaret Steggles and her friend Hilda and the Challis family. I envy those who live in England and can visit there; it is a long time since I was there, and this book makes me yearn to go back.

A question for literary sleuths

Kate Saunders : The Secrets of Wishtide

Kate Saunders died last April at the age of 62. I knew nothing of her work until I read her obituary in The Guardian. She began her career as an actress but soon realised writing was her true path. Famous for her wit, she said of herself,

I was quite plain for an actress, but for a writer I was GORGEOUS.

Conversational cunning

Listening to a good reading is tripling my pleasure in Proust. I’ve read this section more than once before but never has it come home to me so strongly what a devious little sneak Marcel is.

You need to know that for months he has been trying to engineer a meeting with the aristocratic Mme de Guermantes and is desperate to get into her social circle. He knows perfectly well that she’s the aunt of his friend Saint-Loup. Here’s how he goes about it:

Helen DeWitt : The English Understand Wool

New Directions Press has a new series, Storybook ND, a series of novellas that aim to ‘Deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.’  They include a number of authors including Rachel Ingalls, Natalia Ginzberg, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and the one I read, Helen DeWitt.

Richard Cobb: A Classical Education

Stella Gibbons : Starlight

Stella Gibbons will always be best known for her first book, Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse prize and described by the Sunday Times as ‘very probably the funniest book ever written’. I read it as a teenager and periodically reread it, but for a long time I had no idea that Stella Gibbons had written at least twenty-nine other novels. Thanks are due to the Dean Street press who have a project of republishing novels by writers like Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons who were very aware of the class system of their time and not afraid to have characters who are old, irascible or working class (often all three).