Sarah A Smith
Escape from New Caledonia
The Child of an Ancient People
By Anouar Benmalek (Trans Andrew Riemer)
Harvill Press 245pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
A NOVEL THAT brings together a Muslim transported from his native Algeria, a young French woman unjustly deported as a Communard, and the last infant survivor of the Aborigines of Tasrn~ania is clearly the product of a wide-ranging literary imagination. But Anouar Benmalek – a maths lecturer and writer of AlgerianMoroccan birth, based in France, who lays claim to Swiss and Bavarian ancestry – is perhaps better placed than many to understand how the hazards of fortune can link disparate elements.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate
Thank you to Timothy Ryback @TheIHJR - for his generous review of #Burningthebooks in this month's @Lit_Review - I LOVE the cover too!! Confess I have bought a print copy to frame ... Bonfires of Reason | Literary Review | Issue 489 https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonfires-of-reason