Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
January 4, 2022
In Notes of a Desolate Man (1994) by Chu T’ien-wen, a middle-aged man flies from Taipei to Tokyo to care for his friend dying of AIDS in a unique portrait of Taiwan manners and mores, love and ageing, set against a tragic backdrop of personal loss.
Afro-Colombian writer Arnoldo Palacios’s 1949 The Stars are Black is a trailblazing rendering of the impoverished lives of Black people in the remote Chocó region.
Ambai’s short story collection In a Forest, A Deer (2000), translated from Tamil into English by Lakshmi Holmström unearths women’s hopes from beneath the layers of social expectation.
Thousand Cranes YASUNARI KAWABATA 1952
An epic, intergenerational tale that is also a lament to loss, Song of the Crocodile (2020) by Indigenous writer, Nardi Simpson.
Haruki Murakami’s classic Norwegian Wood (1987, translated into English by Jay Rubin)
The Lost Steps ALEJO CARPENTIER
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House
Conceição Evaristo writes from the perspective of a Black Brazilian woman. Her debut, Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), was published in English (2007), translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz.
Augusto Roa Bastos’s Hijo de hombre (1960) published in English in 1965,
The Lonely Londoners SAMUEL SELVON 1956
James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, Penguin (2004).
George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) explores similar themes to those of The Lonely Londoners and was published two years earlier.
Things Fall Apart CHINUA ACHEBE 1958
GraceLand by Chris Abani (2004).
Books by women writers who embed the Igbo tradition in their work include Ogadinma : Or, Everything Will Be All Right by Ukamaka Olisakwe (2020),
The Son of the House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia (2019)
Sky-high Flames (2005) by gay activist...
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Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War ASSIA DJEBAR 1962
Lila reflects that she has no photograph of her mother, a custom to ensure that even a woman’s image does not leave the home.
Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987) is an uplifting portrayal of one girl Kahu’s determination to overturn male-centred traditions and prove her leadership as a descendant of the legendary ‘whale rider’, Kahutia Te Rangi.
