literature

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Written by one of the most important voices of modern Ecuadorian literature. “If you like Borges, Casares, and Cortasar, buy it with your eyes closed!” —Xenia Germeni

While every year there appear scientific and technological advances to puzzle and dazzle us, people keep on loving one another, feeling fear, thinking, searching, working, walking the paths of life. The more things change, the more they stay the same: it's this paradox that Ubidia evokes so well in these stories. He fuses exotic themes, such as edible books, miniature humans proliferating in laboratories, and a crystal city with the quotidian reality of contemporary Latin America. Mixing the actual and the imaginary, he takes us beyond the limits of science and technology and into the labyrinths of the human soul.

Entertaining and profound. In each of these beautiful stories, Ubidia insists that despite its flights of fancy—including art and science—the human mind cannot go far beyond its own fears, desires, and uncertainties.

“Each story, a world. My favorite storyteller of all time.” —Stef León

“Beautifully written. The author has the gift of building exquisite phrases for the delight of the reader…Abdon uses fantasy as an excuse to explore human nature. This is the type of fantasy that succeeds in delivering not only stories to entertain, but also reflections for the reader on key matters about our humanity.” —Isidro

“Abdon Ubidia is regarded in Latin America and elsewhere as one of the most representative and relevant voices of modern Ecuadorian literature.” —Ecuador Fiction

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This World Does Not Belong to Us

Winner English PEN Award

After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.

“One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.” —NY Times

”Who would have thought that a novel so overflowing with animals, insects, flowers, and shrubs could teach us so much about ourselves?”—Latin American Literature Today

”This World Does Not Belong to Us leads the reader into the deepest, darkest regions of human existence, where what is most infected and rotten becomes beautiful and liberating.” —Toda Literatura

“A deliciously menacing read which I just couldn't put down. Every word punches hard.” —Jan Carson

”I am moved by its tenderness, the shadow of its flight, the kingdom it comes from. Insect and poverty. Larva and death.” —Dara Scully

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The Wall

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.

Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

“Haushofer’s thought-provoking masterpiece stands as a touchstone for popular literary post-apocalypses by such authors as Emily St. John Mandel and Ling Ma and is certain to be a life-changing read for many.” —Library Journal

”A cult classic!” —The New Yorker

''The minimalist plot is enhanced by rich description and wise insight, and the translation succeeds in capturing the author's fluid, lyrical style. Recommended for general readers. —Library Journal

A haunting feminist sci-fi masterpiece and international bestseller that is “as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe” —Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize winner

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The Misfortunates

Frank, tender, and brutally funny, Dimitri Verhulst's semi-autobiographical story details the vibrantly entertaining journey of a boy growing up in a family of alcoholics in Belgium

Sobriety and moderation are alien concepts to the men in Dimmy's family. Useless in all other respects, his three uncles have a rare talent for drinking, a flair for violence, and an unwavering commitment to the pub. And his father Pierre is no slouch either. Within hours of his son's birth, Pierre plucks him from the maternity ward, props him on his bike, and takes him on an introductory tour of the village bars. His mother soon leaves them to it and as Dimmy grows up amid the stench of stale beer, he seems destined to follow the path of his forebears and make a low-life career in inebriation, until he begins to piece together his own plan for the future.

“Verhulst's gift for imagery is impressive . . . the humour is pitch-black and very funny.” —Prospect

“Verhulst's prose is always a delight . . .This is a subtle and wonderfully told story.” —Financial Times

“Ceaselessly entertaining . . . it bursts with humour and energy that never lets up.” —BookMunch

“Outrageousness yields to eloquent recognition in this darkly intelligent novel.” —Irish Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Morgan Downie for the suggestion.)

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Thirty Days

With a sharp and observational eye, Annelies Verbeke takes a funny, imaginative, and perceptive look at the realities and absurdities of human interactions, relationships, and everyday life.

Verbeke matches poetic prose with a cast of intriguing characters and unexpected plot twists. Our protagonist is Alphonse, a Senegalese immigrant who uproots his life in Brussels to become a handyman in a rural district in Flanders. Likable and charismatic, people cannot help but reveal their secrets, desires, and unexpected dreams to him. In her typically astute style, Verbeke weaves a vivid and thought-provoking tale of contemporary life, subtly touching upon timely themes such as refugees and racism.

Thirty Days is a deeply moving story about love, outsiders, and the human need to connect, compellingly translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters.

“While Thirty Days deals with these very contemporary, divisive themes of immigration, displacement, racism, and the rise of hate groups, it is not an overtly political novel, but an artful examination of the rich, interior life of one Senegalese immigrant, living in Belgium.” —The Literary Review

“Verbeke has constructed an entire life in 30 days (the chapters are numbered as such), and the result is nothing less than extraordinary.” —The Gazette

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

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Cobalt Blue

A literary sensation in South Asia, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in India through a love triangle with a brother and sister falling for the same man. Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity.

Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, Western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future.

Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them

“A mesmerizing novel of heartbreak, memory, and the ease of falling in love set against the impossibility of fully knowing other people.” —Kamila Shamsie, noted author

“One of the most shocking and brilliantly worded stories of love. . . . The story will stick with you, and long after you read it, the novel will play on your mind, forcing you to revisit it from time to time.” ―Buzzfeed

“Cobalt Blue reads like a love song . . . Kundalkar’s writing is masterful in its play of voice, capturing through his characters the claustrophobia of a small town, their longing to escape a middle class existence, and how love, and being in love, has the ability to transform every small detail from the mundane to the magnificent.”—Scroll.in

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The Sorrow of War

The daring and controversial novel that took the world by storm—a story of politics, selfhood, survival, and war.

Heart-wrenching, fragmented, raw, former Vietcong soldier Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed everything.

In this novel of North Vietnam, Kien, a lone survivor from the Glorious 27th Youth brigade of the Vietcong, revisits the haunting sites of battles and relives a parade of horrors, as he grapples with his ghosts, his alcoholism and attempts to arrange his life in writing.

Published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, this now classic work has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller.

“Vaults over all the American fiction that came out of the Vietnam War to take its place alongside the greatest war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. This is to understate its qualities, for, unlike All Quiet, it is about much more than war. A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful, agonizing love story.” —The Independent

“Dramatic . . . Chronicle[s] the wrecked lives of North Vietnamese soldiers who enter the war with blazing idealism, only to sink deeper into disillusionment and pessimism as everything they know falls apart around them.” —The Washington Post

“Powerful . . . A remarkable emotional intensity builds as the author mixes harrowing flashback scenes from the war with images from his pastoral youth, from his heartbreaking homecoming after a decade away, and finally from the nightmare calamity that gives the book its tragic power.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

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The Castle

Kafka's final novel was written during 1922, when the tuberculosis that was to kill him was already at an advanced stage. Left unfinished by Kafka and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle.

Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.

Like much of Kafka's work, The Castle is enigmatic and polyvalent. Is it an allegory of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire as it disintegrates into modern nation states, or a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? Is it the search by a central European Jew for acceptance and integration into a dominant culture? Is it a spiritual quest for grace or salvation, or an individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is K. is an opportunist, a victim, or an outsider battling against an elusive authority? Is the Castle a benign source of authority or a whimsical system of control?

Like K., the reader is presented with conflicting perspectives that rehearse the existential dilemmas and uncertainties of literary modernity.

“[Harman’s translation is] semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka’s nuances, and responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come.” —The New York Review of Books

Note: The translation by Mark Harman is the one we recommend.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Spaceman of Bohemia

“A love song to Prague....Funny, humane and oddly down-to-earth in ways that its scenario cannot possibly convey. With its lessons in Czech history/culture and interplanetary shenanigans, this zany satirical debut is bursting at the seams and should win many fans.” (Guardian)

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Prochvozka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo space mission offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.

Alone in deep space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth?

Rich with warmth and suspense and surprise, Spaceman of Bohemia is an exuberant delight from start to finish. Very seldom has a novel this profound taken readers on a journey of such boundless entertainment and sheer fun.

”In Kalfar's zany novel . . . the spaceman, the alien, and the rest of the book's extravagant conceptual furniture are merely metaphors for the human-scale issues that are its real concerns, in particular the collapse of Jakub's marriage. That's not to say Kalfar hasn't done his research. There are lovingly detailed passages on life in zero gravity, but all the whizzy space business is harnessed to the basic question of what it means to leave and whether it's possible to come back. The alien acts as a Proustian trigger for Jakub's memories . . . But for all the strangeness of outer space, it is the writing about his home, the place to which he longs to return and perhaps never can, that beats strongest in this wry, melancholy book.” —NY Times Book Review

”The best, most enjoyably heartbreaking, most fun book you'll read this year. On the surface, you'll see affinities with Gary Shteyngart, with The Martian, with Kelly Link. But Jaroslav Kalfar's voice is entirely his own. I beg you: take this strange, hilarious, profound, life-affirming trip into literary outer space.” —Library Journal

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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Amora

Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016—including the Prêmio Jabuti and Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura—Amora has propelled Natália Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.

From an emerging talent comes an exquisite collection of stories exploring the complexity of love between women.

Amora dares explore the way women love each other—the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.

Together, these stories and the women who inhabit them reveal an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. These pages are adorned with a mosaic of unforgettable moments, including a lesbian granddaughter discovering unexpected commonalities with her grandmother, a teenager’s tryst with her friend after disenchanting sex with a boy, and an old couple’s dreamy Sunday-morning ritual.

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Under My Skin



Min Lee is a workaholic who can’t say no. She substitutes sleep with Red Bull and, through a combination of repression and bad habits, has managed to score herself a luxury apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and the approval of her billionaire CEO. Things are looking pretty awesome… well, apart from those body image issues that constantly plague her.

But Min thinks she's got everything worked out. She's arranged her comfort zone and has zero desire to look outside of it… or, so she tells herself.

It’s not until a troubled schoolgirl tracks her down from the Internet, stalks her to her home and noses her way into life that Min begins to admit that something is wrong in her perfect world. Something that she's never thought about before, and doesn’t even want to think about. Something that has the power to ruin all her relationships and dismantle everything in her life she’s worked so very hard for.

What if “she” isn’t the right word for Min at all?

“When was the last time a book hooked you so deeply you actually worried about the characters when you weren't reading? I didn’t want this book to end!” —Olin Elliott

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I Hope We Choose Love

American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book & Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as Adrienne MareeBrown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.

“In this brave and skillfully written collection of essays, Kai Cheng Thom dares to be really honest—to write truths that go beyond easy orthodoxy to her and our own messy, complex, real stories. As a suicide survivor and someone who does work around suicide in queer and femme communities, I deeply appreciate her clarity about how suicide shows up in queer and trans communities and the ways in which social justice, queer, trans and/or Black and brown communities turn on and hurt each other while trying to keep ourselves safe. This is a brave book, and an essential text for everyone trying like hell to create something that will come after the end of the world. Read it, and prepare to have your mind challenged and opened.” —Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

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Little Fish

Winner, Lambda Literary Award; Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma (grandmother) passes away, Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy's Opa (grandfather)—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, but as Wendy's life grows increasingly volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa's truth.

But this isn’t a story about her Opa. It’s a slice-of-life story about Wendy. Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined.

“I have never felt as seen, understood, or spoken to as I did when I read Little Fish. Never before in my life. Casey remains one of THE authors to read if you want to understand the interior lives of trans women in this century.” —Meredith Russo, author of If I Was Your Girl

“A touching and beautiful novel.” —The Independent (UK)

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Don Quixote

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly 400 years.

With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, “just as some people read the Bible.”

Note: Great on audio. We recommend Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of this Spanish masterpiece.

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Anxious People

A Book of the Month Club selection, Best of Fall in Good Housekeeping, PopSugar, The Washington Post, NY Post, and more

“[A] quirky, big-hearted novel…Wry, wise, and often laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure.” —People

From the bestselling author of A Man Called Ove comes a charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.

Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an 87-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world.

Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious times.

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Cutting for Stone

A sweeping, emotionally riveting novel with over 1 million copies sold—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to NYC and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
 
“A masterpiece. . . Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus. The writing is graceful, the characters compassionate and the story full of nuggets of wisdom.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Lush and exotic. . . Shows how history, landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life. . . . Verghese creates this story so lovingly that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. You may never leave the chair.” —LA Times
 
“Absorbing, exhilarating. . . . If you’re hungry for an epic . . . open the covers of Cutting for Stone, [then] don’t expect to do much else.” —The Seattle Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

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Addis Ababa Noir

Named one of the Top African Books of 2020

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original anthologies. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It’s a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside . . .

Despite the varied and distinct voices in these pages, no single book can contain all of the wonderful, intriguing, vexing complexities of Addis Ababa. But what you will read are stories by some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers.

“Addis Ababa Noir is a beautiful read, and it succeeds in the historical excavation it undertakes . . . a powerful collection, carefully curated and plunging unexpected depths.” —New Frame

“Each contributor embraces day-to-day life in Ethiopia, and fills each story with a rich sense of time, place, and character. The authors also reveal much about a culture unfamiliar to many American readers.” —Publishers Weekly

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Funny Boy

Lambda Literary Award Winner

An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.

Arjie is “funny.”

The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.

Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, this deeply moving novel, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.

“Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.” —New York Times Book Review

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Hunger

First published in 1890 in Norwegian and based on Hamsun's own experiences with poverty prior to his success as an author, Hunger tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital city of Kristiania (now Oslo) looking for food. This starving young man attempts to create an outward illusion of sanity and rationality, but his inner mind is becoming increasingly disturbed and delusional. He is kind to others and generous with the little he has, but he also refuses to find work to help support himself and becomes sicker and sicker in both his mind and body as he starves. His deterioration, both mental and physical, is captured in stunning and shocking detail.

While the ending is one of hope and optimism, Hunger is a searing portrait of poverty and despair, as well as a biting social commentary on modern urban life and how desperate things can become for the poor in large cities. Nobel Prize winning Hamsun is at his best in this classic of modern literature.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Ice Palace

In rural Norway, one evening after school, 11-year-old Siss and Unn strike up a deep and unusual bond. When the next day Unn sets off into the wintry woods in search of a mysterious frozen waterfall, known locally as the “ice palace,” and does not return, a devastated Siss takes it upon herself to find her missing friend.

Siss's struggle with her fidelity to the memory of her friend and Unn's fatal exploration of the strange, terrifyingly beautiful frozen waterfall that is the Ice Palace are described in prose of a lyrical economy that ranks among the most memorable achievements of modern literature thanks in large part to Vesaas's unique command of a sparse, figurative and fragmentary style.

“Austere poetical clarity, stoical wisdom and a vivid response to nature.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Vesaas’s laconic sentences are as cold and simple as ice—and as fantastic.” — Daily Telegraph

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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