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Book Review

Book Review by Ifedinma Dimbo - Good Offices - By Evelio Rosero (New Directions)

Last update: Sunday, January 15, 2012, 02:12 | © Metro Éireann

Good Offices is Evelio Rosero’s lurid and satirical attempt at exposing the happenings in one of the world’s greatest social institutions, the Catholic Church. Our protagonist in this slim volume is a young hunchback, Tancredo, living in the presbytery of the parish church, whose duties include overseeing daily charity lunches for the town’s poor and the needy, specifically the old and infirm, the destitute, the prostitutes, the blind – each group attended to on a given day.

Book Review by Roslyn Fuller Alms on the Highway By Various Authors (TCD Oscar Wilde Centre)

Last update: Thursday, December 1, 2011, 03:23 | © Metro Éireann

This collection of short stories and poems from the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin starts out strong, winding ethereally down dark but cosy streets, and more or less keeps up the quality.

Book Review by Ifedinma Dimbo - The Consequences of Love, By Sulaiman Addonia (Vintage)

Last update: Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 13:15 | © Metro Éireann

Freedom – the meaning of this word seems to have brought many a society to its knees in recent times. Ideally people want to be able to make their own decisions, to live as they choose. In reality, this is usually not the case ¬– in some societies more than others.

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm Translated and edited by Maria Tatar

Last update: Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 14:34 | © Metro Éireann

Book Review by Jeanette Rehnstrom

Book Review by Roslyn Fuller - The Avenue By James Lawless (Wordsonthestreet)

Last update: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 10:03 | © Metro Éireann

Franky, a shy thirty- or forty-something librarian, has spent his entire life on ‘The Avenue’, somewhere presumably in a less affluent part of Dublin. Having devoted his younger years to caring for his depressed father, Franky married young to the older Myrtle to avoid the scandal of a child born out of wedlock, and has shuffled along ever since, engaged in retiring activities like gardening and reading.

Book Review by Ifedinma Dimbo

Last update: Saturday, October 1, 2011, 12:00 | © Metro Éireann

The Los Angeles Times bracketed Cesar Aira with the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and WG Sebald as one of “those great modernists whom fiction was a theatre of ideas”. Not having read any of these authors before, I accepted this at face value. Then I read The Seamstress and the Wind, and I understood.

Book Review by Roslyn Fuller - The Psychopath Test By Jon Ronson (Picador)

Last update: Thursday, September 1, 2011, 09:10 | © Metro Éireann

In this humourous non-fiction book, Guardian journalist Jon Ronson explores the worlds of insanity, psychiatry and the media. I liked Ronson’s two previous books, and I expected this one would provide a convenient test to find out just which of the jerks I have to deal with in daily life are actually clinical psychopaths!

The Leviathan By Joseph Roth (New Directions Pearl)

Last update: Monday, August 15, 2011, 19:31 | © Metro Éireann

Book Review by Ifedinma Dimbo

Voluntary Madness By Norah Vincent (Chatto & Windus)

Last update: Monday, August 1, 2011, 11:54 | © Metro Éireann

In 2006 ‘immersion journalist’ Norah Vincent recounted her experience of pretending to be a man in Self-Made Man, a book that made lots of noise and shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism By Ha-Joon Chang (Allen Lane)

Last update: Friday, July 15, 2011, 22:12 | By: Rose Foley

This is a book that is about exactly what it says on the cover – 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism – although the identity of ‘they’ remains unclear. Fox News, perhaps? Or CNN? The media and politicians in general? It’s hard to tell, because they definitely live somewhere more mainstream than me: the 23 things in this book are pretty widely acknowledged as fact in both academic and alternative circles.

The Golden Cage By Shirin Ebadi (Kales Press)

Last update: Friday, July 1, 2011, 17:49 | © Metro Éireann

Shirin Ebadi is an internationally recognised human rights activist and a lawyer from Iran. In 2003 she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, especially in promoting the rights of women, children and political prisoners in Iran. It is believed that it was her call for democracy in her homeland that made her an enemy of the current Iranian regime; she has lived in exile in London since 2009.

Book Review by Jeanette Rehnstrom: Tablet & Pen Edited by Reza Aslan (Norton)

Last update: Thursday, June 16, 2011, 11:34 | © Metro Éireann

This tour of the literary landscape of the Middle East in the 20th century is a bold challenge with so much territory to cover. Yet despite missing out on one of my personal favourites, Egyptian writer Nawal el Saadawi, editor Reza Aslan has made a valiant effort, especially in terms of gender equality, in the works chosen for this collection.

Book Review by Roslyn Fuller: Tyrant Memory By Horacio Castellanos Moya (New Directions)

I’m nearly always impressed by the quality of work brought out by New Directions, and this book was no exception.

Only This Room - By Kerry Hardie (Gallery)

Being an immigrant in Ireland, I’m doing my best to catch up with the literature and poetry of my adopted home country. However, what stops me from immersing myself wholly is the fact that there’s so much to read from all over the world, so much to keep up with!

An Empty Room - By Mu Xin (New Directions)

An Empty Room is a collection of 13 short stories that take the human conditions at their heart and are narrated with flair and subtlety. Though each story stands on its own, one can perceive the flow that connects them all.

Hate: A Romance By Tristan Garcia (Faber and Faber)

In 2008, 30-year-old writer Tristan Garcia managed to charm the journalists judging for the French Prix de Flore with Hate: A Romance, his first novel, ensuring his award of that sought-after prize – famously won 12 years previously by Michel Houellebecq.

A Farewell to Arms - By Ernest Hemingway (Random House)

One of Hemingway’s middling novels, both chronologically and in terms of quality, A Farewell to Arms tells the story of First World War ambulance driver Frederick Henry and his relationship with British nurse Catherine Barkley – told, of course, in Hemingway’s signature flat, unadorned prose.

The Other Hand - By Chris Cleave (Scepter)

The Other Hand begins with Little Bee, a 14-year-old Nigerian from an oil-producing village in the Delta Region who witnesses the burning of her village and the killing of her parents during some undefined conflict.

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