I hope everyone who celebrates had a lovely Easter and Holi, and a wonderful Eid al-Fitr to come next week to all who celebrate that! What do South Africa's former first couple, Black inexpression, and Uyghur poets have in common? Books about or by them were all National Book Critics Circle Award [...]
Let's start with bookish events in the country: Natali Simmonds hosts a resilience in writing workshop at ABC Amsterdam on 8 March, our Book Chats book club meets in Amsterdam on 22 March to discuss Scorched Grace, Emily Hund presents her book The Influencer Industry at the John Adams Institute on 18 [...]
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize.
By Sophie Let's start off with some award winners: this year's Newbery Medal (for best US children's book, basically) was won by Dave Eggers for The Eyes and the Impossible (illustrated by Shawn Harris). The Caldecott Medal (for best illustrations of a children's book) was awarded to Vashti Harrison for Big. [...]
Written by SophieHeyo! Happy 2024, first of all, may it be a very bookish and kind year to you and yours. To celebrate this new year we're bringing back an Olde Blogge favorite (to write, in any case): the Bookbits, bookish news in small bites. We hope you'll enjoy them throughout the [...]
Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize. But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
Luke and Iris W. are back with our first ABC Staff Picks of 2023. Think cozy titles, biographies, science fiction novellas, a YA horror title and much more…. As the books buyer for Amsterdam’s film section, Luke chose two quite different memoirs from two famous authors. Both have similar themes about [...]
written by Lynn Forty years ago this February, I landed at Baltimore airport in the worst snowstorm they’d had in 10 years. On the way to our host Larry Boltansky’s home, the freeway was closed and we had to shovel the station wagon out from under snow to get to a side [...]
It is almost Valentine’s Day! Need some 19th century dating advice? “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” Jane Austen taught us in her masterwork, Pride and Prejudice. Yes, in Ms. Austen’s time, the [...]
written by Lília With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we thought we’d home in on screen adaptations of romantic fiction. Because who hasn’t heard of or watched – maybe many times! –adaptions of Jane Austen’s books such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Emily Brontë’s [...]
