Recently I joined two new book groups, because, obviously, my TBR pile wasn’t ridiculous enough. I love a deadline and not, (to paraphrase Douglas Adams,) because I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by, but because a deadline means that I will actually, definitely, genuinely read the exciting sounding book that I’ve […]
Four victims. Four different locations. One strange mark on the bodies and one geographical link: all were born in Voineasa. In this slim Romanian noir novel, trained killer Sergiu Manta and police inspector Marius Stanescu are forced to work together to find out how these four disparate deaths are connected. Sergiu has his orders and […]
No, I haven’t branched out into reviewing erotica. The title of Tsutsui’s collection is apt, however, as it features stories which are always bizarre and frequently feature sexual deviance. Of course, normality and sexual propriety are cultural constructs, and Tsutsui delights in tearing these apart to examine them. Amongst this apparently wanton destruction, the reader […]
“This isn’t a movie. It’s a short story.” In fact, it’s twenty of them, all written by popular Japanese author, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and selected from a career spanning over fifty years, which he admits is now coming to a close. “The ideas aren’t coming anymore,” he told Andrew Driver, translator of this rather miscellaneous, but […]