This is an archived issue of Belletrista. If you are looking for the current issue, you can find it here |
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US author Sigrid Nunez discusses her new novel with Joyce Nickel
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TRIO: Three remarkable works by Kamila Shamsie by Caitlin Fehir
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Belletrista turns one! A brief retrospective and a look ahead
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Reviews
Click on 'Reviews' to see the full list of this issue's reviews...
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TO HELL WITH CRONJÉ
Ingrid Winterbach
Translated from the Afrikaans by Elsa Silke
To Hell With Cronjé is Ingrid Winterbach's literary examination of one of the turning points of South African history: the Second Boer War of 1899‒1902. The wars between Britain and the fledgling, and doomed, Boer nation have been largely ignored in English language literature …
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Reviewed by Andy Barnes
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THE BLINDNESS OF THE HEART
Julia Franck
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
A prologue opens the novel. It is some time during World War II and a woman, Alice, abandons her seven-year old son at a railway station. The story proper begins many years earlier in the town of Bautzen … where
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Reviewed by Amanda Meale
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PURGE
Sofi Oksanen
Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers
Estonia 1992, right after the fall of the Soviet Union, is a turbulent place, even in a small village far off the centre of events. The old woman Aliide is waiting for the legal rights to her family's lands and forests, once claimed to collective farming, to be returned to her.
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Reviewed by Anders Duus
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MEEKS
Julia Holmes
Rolling Stone editor Julia Holmes's first novel, Meeks, owes a lot to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," the classic 1948 short story which opens with a seemingly innocent town meeting in an unspecified time and place, and gradually increases the reader's sense of foreboding until the very end when somebody heaves a rock, "and then they were upon her." Shivers!
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Reviewed by Jean Raber
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2017: A NOVEL
Olga Slavnikova
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
If Olga Slavnikova's novel, 2017, is any indication, the near-future of post-Soviet Russia—and the world in general—looks pretty grim on a variety of fronts, in large part because people of the techno-boom have lost touch with their own history and culture.
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Reviewed by Jean Raber
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