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This book won the International Booker Prize in 2024. But since I am German, I took the opportunity to read it in my native language. Most of the novel is about a two-year love story between a very unlikely couple. Hans is a 53-year-old successful writer. He is married with a son. He also has…
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The setting of the story is an isolated hamlet of three houses and a stable for cows in the French countryside. However, most of the story unfolds in the kitchen/dining room of the main house. Readers used to stories that are driven by a mix of narrative and extensive dialogues among the protagonists will have…
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In the final paragraph, the author writes, “This was an only-in-America story of glorious accomplishments and unfinished business, made possible by the broader political and economic currents that shaped more than half a century of history” (p. 411). First, obviously, there is some hyperbole in this statement, though few would doubt that our everyday…
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Margot Friedlander lived in Nazi Berlin with her mother and younger brother. It is January 20, 1943. By that time, many Jews, including some of her family and her father, had already fled Germany. The frequency of deportations to a mythical ‘East’ from which no one ever returned had increased. Living conditions had become increasingly…
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This book is neither an academic monograph nor a novel, or a biography. Rather, it is the story of the Jewish community (Juderia) on the Italian (now Greek) island of Rhodes, that had existed there for ages until it was destroyed by the German occupation forces in July 1944. The Jewish community in Rhodes were…
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This is the second novel about people living in an authoritarian/totalitarian political system that I have recently read. The first one was Celeste Ng’s “Our Missing Hearts.” It is about a fictional USA in times of anti-Chinese racism (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376303904_Celeste_Ng_2022_Our_Missing_Hearts_London_Abacus_Books_335_pp ). Paul Lynch’s novel—which won the Booker Prize 2023—turns Ireland into a fictional totalitarian state. Where…
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This book was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, which was won by Peter Lynch’s Prophet Song (see the separate note on that book). The paperback edition of Murray’s text is plastered with intrusive endorsements. Frankly, I strongly dislike this practice, although I do not mind a handful of them. Nevertheless, the book is well…
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Like many people, I don’t have the time or inclination to scour the entire marketplace for fiction and non-fiction books, so I rely on recommendations from a variety of sources. One such trusted source is the Booker Prize, both the original and the one for translations. I had just received four books from the longlist…
Books worth reading 