I opened this book (published in 1999) with trepidation, a question on my lips:  “Do I really want to go to this inhospitable place, if only in my mind?”  There are no photographs, but as I read, I realise that pictorial images aren’t necessary.  Thubron’s descriptions are rich, delving below the surface, showing how history and environment[…]

Cast out from his Quaker community in 18th-century Pennsylvania, Daniel Dickinson strikes a Faustian bargain and heads west to the plantations of Western Virginia with his children and 15-year-old wife, who is not a wife, to live among slave owners in the hope of finding a place where his family can prosper.   Inexperienced in[…]

With their genesis in the Soviet siege and invasion of Nazi-controlled Budapest during the latter stages of the Second World War, Dobozy’s interlinked stories run the risk of overwhelming readers with the attrocities committed during one of the darkest periods in Hungary’s history, and the psychological and emotional effects on survivors.   The horror is[…]