Mneh.

Not for the kiddies.

Only the Edward Fitzgerald translation will do.

I read this out loud to myself on my eighteenth birthday as I walked from one end of the city to the other down to the ocean, sat on a rock for a while staring at the sea and the moon and the stars below, placed one little rose from my friend down on the stones, and smashed a clear glass bottle overtop of it.

Perfect.

This book, a letter from one woman to another, will break your heart, or at least change the way you see a good deal of things, not least about Senegal.

Harsh, soothing, bitter and gentle. I could feel and see and taste and smell my way through the world’s of Saro-Wiwa’s characters in this amazing book of short stories. The second section especially, entitled ‘High Life,’ is at times morose and others contemplative but always demands reassessment of the lives and the stories being written out. Powerful stuff.

This is an startling, sweet novel… if you have read some of Shields’ other books. Having become familiar with the fumbling desires and inadequacies of her characters through Larry’s Party and The Stone Diaries, I think I was ready to embrace this book (not least because I just moved to Toronto, and there’s much to the intersection of Bloor and Bathurst here). That being said, if you have, it will leave you breathless with its spare wisdom and almost wondrous, dire cynicism and hope.

A really good book, that is to say.

This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Rigoberta Menchu gives a visceral account of her youth and the formative experiences in her aboriginal community in Guatemala that led to her becoming an worthy leader and a very inspiring human being.

Nomi is an incredibly complex character and you cannot help but be drawn into her. Think Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar…

Now you have no excuse not to know!

If Dubliners were about Lisbon, and was also a collection of stories about a simple, lonely, desperate man, and was also randomly assembled from a chest full of poems, chapters, verses and stories found after Joyce’s death, it might look something like this.