Around the World in Words: England

In almost 30 years of reading, I have read and loved the work of George Orwell, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, J.K Rowling, Jeremy Clarkson, Ben Elton, Enid Blyton, Daphne du Maurier, Nick Hornby, Leslie Charteris, and William Thackeray. This long list of English authors is hardly comprehensive.

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Five Fingers for Marseilles – Review

Contrary to confused belief, Five Fingers for Marseilles is not South Africa’s first Western. Our film industry is well-aged and with it comes eons of storytelling ingrained in our very souls. And this Western is neither the first nor is it original. It’s a pastiche of passion composed of Fordian frames and Leonean tension.

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Around the World in Words: Zimbabwe

If you live in South Africa and have never met a Zimbabwean, you live under a rock. At one I point, I had two colleagues from Zimbabwe, one of whom (along with a South African colleague) recommended Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Her novel marked the first time in my challenge that I chose a book recommended by someone from that country. It’s something I hope to do more of, as I progress in my travels. Nervous Conditions also ticks the other boxes for this challenge: the author is from Zimbabwe and the story is set in Zimbabwe.

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Around the World in Words: Czech Republic

When I found War of the Newts on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore, I remembered reading about it in an article from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Back then the story appealed to me, and upon finding the book and discovering the author was from the Czech Republic (a country I had not yet travelled to for my reading challenge), it inevitably became my next destination.

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