Karen Leeder

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Dinah Birch |Robert Rubsam |Karen Leeder |Kate Mcloughlin

It is easy to see why an enterprising novelist might want to revisit a nineteenth-century classic. Conversations between writers of different generations can challenge stale assumptions. And there are practical advantages for both publisher and author. Dedicated fans of the original book will constitute something approaching a guaranteed readership. With luck, the novel might be paired with its literary parent on an academic syllabus.

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Kate Mcloughlin |Robert Rubsam |Karen Leeder |Dinah Birch

She’s “a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story”, says Nour of Mouna, his shape-shifting mother, and of his birth country, Egypt. Nour is the letter writer of Youssef Rakha’s epistolary novel The Dissenters, the first that the Egyptian author, poet and essayist has written in English.

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Karen Leeder |Alexander Leissle |Dinah Birch |Kate Mcloughlin

When asked which historical female figure he would most like to dine with, Umberto Eco named the renowned medieval beauty Uta von Naumburg “above all others”. The same impulse appears to have been true of Günter Grass, if we are to take at face value a little story discovered in his archive and first published in Germany as Figurenstehen: Eine Legende (2022), seven years after his death.

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Alexander Leissle |Dinah Birch |Karen Leeder |Kate Mcloughlin

Picture this: a green silk sofa and a “Chinese” coffee table lit by Tiffany lamps; a copy of Bunte, a gossip magazine, faded and splayed open to reveal a picture of a blurry, besoffen Prince Ernst August von Hannover; a fly quivering against the window, “fatally drowsy”; an octogenarian woman “hunched crookedly, smiling” in the doorway, her face “bruised, ruined … puffy from vodka and phenobarbital”. “Mama”, says our narrator.

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Dinah Birch |Alexander Leissle |Karen Leeder |Kate Mcloughlin

Bernhard Schlink was thinking about moral responsibility and redemption long before The Reader (1997; Der Vorleser, 1995) first appeared. One of Germany’s most distinguished legal academics, he became a judge in 1988 and began to publish fiction at about the same time. His first novels feature a detective called Selb (“Self”), a man haunted by his former complicity with the Nazi regime.