That venerable and dedicated historian of ancient India travelled half a century ago to northern and north-western China to work at the cave sites of Maijishan and Dunhuang; based on her dia... read more
Manon Gropius (1916-1935) was the daughter of Walter and Alma. Her attempts to free herself from maternal expectations and the recurrent image of herself in her stepfather's novels are movin... read more
Who in the UK now remembers Ransmayr's 'The Last World', about Ovid in exile, which was such a bestseller in 1990? He remains a major European literary figure, and his new novel about Aliste... read more
Last autumn we had the great Dutch writer's 533: A Book of Days, a sort of diary of the pandemic on Menorca. Now we have this single poem which repeatedly refers back to images of wartime; h... read more
A novel about the harrowing life of the great Russian poetess. She was involved with both Pasternak and Rilke; her daughter died in the Moscow famine; her husband was executed; and she herse... read more
The French-Lebanese writer - no stranger to complicated ethnicities or religious groups - has set this novel in a small Albanian community in the mountains of southern Italy. Often comic, so... read more
A memoir of life as a small girl in Rabindranath Tagore's famous cultural community in the 1930s, by one of India's foremost literary figures. Translated from the Bengali. (Originally due fo... read more
All that remains of the Osnabruk synagogue is a small pile of stones and some chickenwire: a space of oblivion in the German city explored by Cixous, whose Jewish mother came from there.