Recommendations from our site
“This complicated novel which operates at all sorts of different levels, but might be most simply described as a coming-of-age novel. It’s about a boy from provincial Flanders and all the ghosts that haunt him—ghosts from the World Wars, religion, and family disputes that have never been resolved. It’s crazy, picaresque writing. It perhaps doesn’t work all the way through, but nobody could read it and not feel that they had acquired a sense of what Belgium was really about. In that sense, he’s the sort of literary equivalent of the songs of Jacques Brel.” Read more...
Martin Conway, Historian
Our most recommended books
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa -
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Aura
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Lysander Kemp -
Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel
by Luo Guanzhong & Moss Roberts (translator) -
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy -
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
by Randolph Stow