Natasha Pulley is one of the best and most consistently stunning novelists of our time. Just as The Iliad isn’t (really) about the Trojan war, The Hymn to Dionysus is not about an endangered kingdom. It’s about looking at oneself and finding the divine heroism within.
An eccentric but ostensibly brilliant author has a new book ready for translation. She summons her equally odd but insightful translators to her home on the edge of the Bialowieza forest reserve in Poland. They all get together, go through the manuscript and spend all day translating from Polish into their respective languages. But this…
On a whim, Boultin’s friend sent him an auction listing for a scrap of silent film reel that was labelled Tour de France. He won Lot 212 and embarked on a three-year, multinational odyssey to preserve the film and restore it to its place in history, however small that might be.
Before Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters, or the historical novels of Walter Scott, there were the Porter Sisters. Devoney Looser traces the fascinating, if difficult, lives of the influential authors that have been largely overlooked.
Regular readers of Natasha Pulley will find this novel to be least like any of her others. While there are some winks to her other universes (a pet octopus, a lighthouse), this may be her most grim. The alternate realities explored by her previous characters exist only in the author’s imagination. Here it is a battle of conflicting realities — the one which is killing people covertly and the one which the government wishes to portray.