Boyd Tonkin

A broken nation: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by Wole Soyinka, reviewed

4 December 2021 9:00 am

One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…

The power of the translator to break nations

17 July 2021 9:00 am

No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…

A Danubian Narnia: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, reviewed

5 June 2021 9:00 am

Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…

The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed

10 April 2021 9:00 am

In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…

Algeria’s War of Independence still leaves festering wounds, two new novels reveal

27 February 2021 9:00 am

In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…

In search of Noëlle: Invisible Ink, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed

9 January 2021 9:00 am

At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…

Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed

3 October 2020 9:00 am

The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…

Stockholm syndrome: The Family Clause, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, reviewed

1 August 2020 9:00 am

Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…

Foreign fields: Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation

4 July 2020 9:00 am

If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…

Sinister toy story: Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

18 April 2020 9:00 am

We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of…

Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare revisits ‘home’

1 February 2020 9:00 am

Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native…

Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you…

A cross between Joyce Grenfell and Frida Kahlo: Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins

26 October 2019 9:00 am

In 1971, Tove Jansson paid one of her many visits to London, where 1960s fashion hangovers made the whole city…

In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of

28 September 2019 9:00 am

Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her…

An inflatable boat with 47 migrants is rescued off Libya’s coast in January 2019. Credit: Getty Images

Desperate souls: Travellers, by Helon Habila, reviewed

29 June 2019 9:00 am

Death by water haunts the stories of Africans in Europe that flow through this fourth novel by Helon Habila. From…

Credit: Getty Images

Fun at the EU’s expense: The Capital, by Robert Menasse, reviewed

16 February 2019 9:00 am

Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of…

Chigozie Obioma. Credit: Jason Keith.

An Igbo Paradise Lost: An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man…

Adam Mickiewicz, the author of Pan Tadeusz.

A Lithuanian Romeo and Juliet: Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz, reviewed

15 December 2018 9:00 am

It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts…

The two works of fiction I re-read annually

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…

The Shape of the Ruins, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, reviewed

16 June 2018 9:00 am

What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the…

Frankenstein’s monster is more frightening than ever

17 March 2018 9:00 am

On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon…

Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s

13 January 2018 9:00 am

In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…

Navigating a new world

14 October 2017 9:00 am

In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of…

Return to the lost city

26 August 2017 9:00 am

During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…

Hot Spring

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Imagine if Kathy Lette — or possibly Julie Burchill — had written a feminist, magic-realist saga that sent four women…