Ferrante

Pallati i ëndrrave by Ismail Kadare (The Palace of Dreams, translated by Barbara Bray) – ALBANIAThe Book Thief by Markus Zusak – AUSTRALIAДом, в котором... by Mariam Petrosyan (The Gray House, translated by Yuri Machkasov) – ARMENIADer Trafikant by Robert Seethaler (The Tobacconist, translated by Charlotte Collins) – AUSTRIAThe Orphan Sky by Ella Leya – AZERBAIJANMoi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes by Jacqueline Harpman (I Who Have Never Known Men, translated by Ros Schwartz) – BELGIUMUhvati zeca by Lana Bastašić (Catch the…

‘Two years before moving out, my father told my mother I was really ugly,” begins Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults in an echo of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. When 12-year-old Giovanna, from an affluent neighbourhood in Naples, overhears her father compare her to his hated sister, Vittoria, about whom he once said “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection”, her world is turned upside down. She had always sought the approval of her father, a leftwing intellectual and teacher who, in turn, took pride in his…

My earliest reading memoryI remember lying in bed with my mother while she read picture books to me when I was three or four, but I think that’s probably an amalgam memory, since she did this every night. I also remember her reading aloud to the whole family while we drove cross-country. Bunnicula by James and Deobrah Howe, about a vampiric rabbit, and its sequel Howliday Inn were big hits.My favourite book growing upI loved slightly starchy, slightly exotic (to me), varyingly outdated children’s novels: The Westing Game…