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Arja Kajermo, Susanna Kajermo Torner | 4.45
I went up to the teacher and held out my hand and told her my name. She took a step back and tilted her head and looked at me without offering her hand. I pulled my hand back and hid it behind my back. She smiled the way grown ups smile at someone else’s ugly baby and then she spoke. ‘That is a strange name, we are not called names like that in Sweden.’
Arja Kajermo’s debut The Iron Age is part coming-of-age novel, and part fairy-tale told from the perspective of a young girl growing up in the poverty of post-war Finland. On her family’s austere farm, the Girl learns stories and... more I went up to the teacher and held out my hand and told her my name. She took a step back and tilted her head and looked at me without offering her hand. I pulled my hand back and hid it behind my back. She smiled the way grown ups smile at someone else’s ugly baby and then she spoke. ‘That is a strange name, we are not called names like that in Sweden.’
Arja Kajermo’s debut The Iron Age is part coming-of-age novel, and part fairy-tale told from the perspective of a young girl growing up in the poverty of post-war Finland. On her family’s austere farm, the Girl learns stories and fables of the world around her – of Miina, their sleeping neighbour; that you should never turn a witch away at the door; how people get depressed if pine trees grow too close to the house; and why her father was unlucky not to have died in the war.
Then, when she is little more than six years only, the family crosses from Finland to Sweden, from a familiar language to a strange one, from one unfriendly home to another. The Girl, mute but watchful, weaves a picture of her volatile father, resilient mother and strangely resourceful brothers.
The Iron Age, which grew out of the story shortlisted for the 2014 Davy Byrne’s Award, is disarming in its unadorned simplicity and unsentimental account of hard times and hard people. In Kajermo’s darkly funny debut, with illustrations throughout, folk tales and traditional custom clash with economic reality, from rural Finland to urban Sweden.
‘This is a short tale, simply and richly told, which feels as though it's the culmination
of a lifetime's work. An instant classic.’ Jon McGregor
‘Deceptively simple yet with cutting insight and devastating humor, The Iron Age proves that the most surreal dwells in reality, and history is the darkest fairytale’ Yiyun Li less 
Neil GriffithsThe Iron Age does two things very well indeed. First, it conjures Finland, which strikes me as a very mysterious place, especially in the early 20th century when this story is set. It’s steeped in myth and that is deeply entrancing in itself; it feels Other, like if one was stranded in Finland, one wouldn’t necessarily be able to operate with one’s western coordinates. (Source)
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On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg’s self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection. more On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg’s self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection. less Neil GriffithsWriting puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully. (Source)
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Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God. This edition features maps. more Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God. This edition features maps. less Neil GriffithsQuite apart from the rendering of its themes, what makes this book so wonderful for me is its gentle sentence-making. Boyle was (and might still be) poet. I love the way, in about a page and a half, Boyle reduces something essential about Englishness, colonialism, the public school system to the self-sufficiency of Robinson Crusoe, and then just riffs on that, with erudition, wit and warmth. What... (Source)
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The story of a billionaire family dynasty, led by a gold-plated madman, stewed in corruption, mired in violence, riven by infighting, deception and lies… The resonances will be there for anyone who knows King Lear - not to mention anyone struggling to come to terms with the new world order - from the rise of the religious right wing in India to the Trump dynasty in the United States. This is not just Shakespeare repurposed for our times – it’s a novel that urgently matters in 2017, and which will resonate for years to come.
Jivan Singh, the bastard scion of the Devraj... more The story of a billionaire family dynasty, led by a gold-plated madman, stewed in corruption, mired in violence, riven by infighting, deception and lies… The resonances will be there for anyone who knows King Lear - not to mention anyone struggling to come to terms with the new world order - from the rise of the religious right wing in India to the Trump dynasty in the United States. This is not just Shakespeare repurposed for our times – it’s a novel that urgently matters in 2017, and which will resonate for years to come.
Jivan Singh, the bastard scion of the Devraj family, returns to his childhood home after a long absence – only to witness the unexpected resignation of the ageing patriarch from the vast corporation he founded, the Devraj Company. On the same day, Sita, Devraj’s youngest daughter, absconds – refusing to submit to the marriage her father wants for her. Meanwhile, Radha and Gargi, Sita’s older sisters, must deal with the fallout… And so begins a brutal, deathly struggle for power, ranging over the luxury hotels and spas of New Delhi and Amritsar, the Palaces and slums of Napurthala, to Srinagar, Kashmir.
Told in astonishing prose – a great torrent of words and imagery – We that are young is a modern-day King Lear that bursts with energy and fierce, beautifully measured rage. Set against the backdrop of the anti-corruption protests in 2011–2012, it provides startling insights into modern India, the clash of youth and age, the hectic pace of life in one of the world’s fastest growing economies – and the ever-present spectre of death. More than that, this is a novel about the human heart. And its breaking point. less Neil GriffithsI have to say while I did love it, it wasn’t an uncomplicated reading experience for me. It’s a reworking of King Lear, and if you really love King Lear, as I do, it actually it makes it quite a weird read, because you’re constantly guessing at what the author is doing: ‘Ah, is she doing this here?’ ‘Is she subverting that?’ ‘Is this supposed to be read like this?’ (Source)
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As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the... more As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard's most ambitious novel since Zone. less Neil GriffithsIt is a brilliant book, and incredibly timely in terms of the west’s relationship with the Middle East. And in a sense it’s a kind of fictionalised version of Edward Said’s Orientalism. It tells us something about how we, in the West, established our perceptions and our relationship with the East, with Otherness, and I found that deeply compelling. (Source)
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