Svetlana's Reads and Views

    Name of Book: Happy Author: Celina Baljeet Basra  ISBN: 9781662602306 Publisher: Astra House  Type of book: "Disneyland park in India" migrants, Europe, 2010, dreams, shattered dreams, reality, Punjab, crossing over illegally  Year it was published: 2023 Summary: For fans of Vikas Swarup and Charles Yu, the story of a starry-eyed cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab to pursue his dreams—a formally daring debut novel set against the global migration crisis. In a rural village of Punjab, India, a moony young man crouches over his phone in a rapeseed field near his family’s cabbage farm. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he’s watching YouTube clips of his favorite film, Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, Happy is often compared to a young Sami Frey by the imaginary journalists that keep him company while he uses the outhouse. Pooing, as he says, “en plein air.” When he’s not sleeping among the cabbages and eating his mother’s sugary rotis, H...

Name of Book: The Translator  Author: Harriet Crawley  ISBN: 978-1-913394-83-7 Publisher:  Bitter Lemon Press  Type of book: Russia, translators, second chances, 2017, oligarch life, secrets, spying, United Kingdom Year it was published: 2023  Summary: The Sunday Best Thrillers of 2023. Financial Best Summer Thrillers of 2023.   “A classic thriller of the new Cold War.” Antony Beevor, author of  Stalingrad.   A highly topical  espionage novel  about a Russian plot to cut the undersea communication cables linking the US to the UK. Also, a passionate love story between two people determined to stop this cataclysmic act. Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister. His life is upended when he discovers that his former lover, Marina Volina, is the interpreter to the Russian President. Together they will try to stop the att...

    Name of Book: Dom Casmurro  Author: Machado de Assis (trans Margaret Jull Costa, Robin Patterson)   ISBN:978-1-324-09070-0 Publisher: Live right  Type of book: Rio de Janeiro Brazil, memories, seminary, wealth, love, secrets, 1857-1870s, friendship, marriage, happiness, jealousy, suspiciousness, adolescence, childhood sweetheart, promises, fictional memoirs  Year it was published: 2023 (1899)  Summary: Dom Casmurro is the nickname of Bento Santiago, who, old and alone, reveals his memories. A promise from his mother shaped his destiny as a priest, but Bento Santiago, in love, abandoned the seminary. He studies law and marries his great love, but jealousy and distrust grow. He suspects that he is not the biological father of the couple's son, Ezequiel, but rather his great friend Escobar. Characters: Main characters are Bento Santiago who is best described as naive and takes things at face value. He is a jealous man but also loyal and semi tale...

    Title of the book: SPQR a history of ancient Rome Author: Mary Beard  Publisher: live right  Publishing Date: 2015 ISBN: 978-1-63149-222-8 Summary: In  SPQR , an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" ( Wall Street Journal ). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" ( Economist ) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" ( Christian Science Monitor ) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" ( Dallas Morning News ) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the...

   Title of the book: the rest is memory  Author: Lily tuck  Publisher: liveright  Publishing Date: 2024  ISBN: 978-1-324-09572-9 Summary: The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo in the hands of one of our greatest novelists. First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead. How did this—the fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholic—happen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished...

    Title of the book: Heart-work; short stories Author: Roberta Silman  Publisher: Campden Hill Books Publishing Date: 2024 (short stores 1977-2024) ISBN: 979-8-9859260-2-6 Summary: IN THIS SECOND COMPELLING COLLECTION of stories Roberta Silman explores the intricacies of love, the infinite surprises that exist within families, and the yearning for guidance that can result in great leaps of the imagination on the part of her passionate and resilient characters. As she did in her first prize-winning collection, Blood Relations, Silman has created a group of unforgettable people who have something to tell us about how to negotiate the often dangerous shoals of daily life. Silman’s understanding of the bonds that create fierce loyalties, her ability to see into her characters’ minds in uncanny ways, and her grasp of the loneliness that is part of the human condition are revealed in these stories, which have appeared in The Atlantic, McCall’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, ...