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Continue reading →: John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James
James’s debut novel tells the story of a battle of good against evil against the backdrop of a corrupt isolated village deep in the Jamaican countryside in the 1950s. The village’s ‘Rum Preacher’ is an alcoholic dealing with a damaged past by preaching morality, but frequently falling short of his…
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Continue reading →: Congo Inc. by In Koli Jean Bofane
(translated by Marjolijn De Jager) This was the first book I’ve read from a series from the Indiana University Press called Global African Voices.26 year old Isookanga, from the Ekonda clan, who are unkindly and demeaningly referred to as ‘Pygmies’, leaves his family deep in the forest of the Congo…
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Continue reading →: Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
Translated by Ross Benjamin. However Kehlmann came across the idea to write a novel about someone who tried to make people laugh and smile during the Thirty Years’ War I can’t imagine, but the result is a tremendous read, and even fun, in places at least. Between 1618 and 1648…
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Continue reading →: Devil Take The Blue-tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin
Ellen, a gifted concert harpsichord player, has suffered a mental breakdown following her seduction as a student by a predatory folk-singer. At the start of the novel she has just left the institution in which she spent 3 years.This is very much in the mould of Patricia Highsmith, who explores…
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Continue reading →: Savage Holiday by Richard Wright
First published in 1954, when at is peak (his third novel), this is something of a departure in style for Wright, in that it is a psycholigical noir-style thriller with an almost entirely white cast. Set on the affluent streets of the Upper East Side Manhattan it concerns the morose…
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Continue reading →: Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell
Parnell’s book tells of his own journey through ghostly literature, and is in addition a memoir, a search on his part for a sort of spiritual consolation. He has a need to visit the places that have been the setting for the ghost stories that have been influential to him…
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Continue reading →: High Willhays and Yes Tor from Black DownOne of the bonuses of the Okehampton Military Training Camp is their private road which, for most of the year, allows access and parking either at Okerment (above the farm) or, as for this route, at Black Down. Yes Tor. High Willhays – the highest point on Dartmoor at 621…
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Continue reading →: The Nebuly Coat by John Meade Falkner
A young architect is sent to the dying, silted-up port of Cullerne to supervise long-overdue repairs to its Minster. But as he comes to know the town and its people, he finds himself caught up in a decades-old mystery. The late Martin Joliffe used to claim he was the real…
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Continue reading →: Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
I can vouch for the rain-lashed and windswept moors that Mary Yellan crosses at the start of the novel, as I’m currently staying on them.. from here, it’s easy to imagine how it must have been as she travelled by stagecoach to the Jamaica Inn in the early part of…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias. Rua is my fox red labrador pup, born 14 Feb 2026 and learning fast..
Where is Rua?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 