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Continue reading →: Musings on The Nursery by Szilvia MolnarPerhaps this is also part of what makes the book so valuable: by refusing to hide the uglier thoughts, Molnar gives them a place to exist. The protagonist is allowed to be frightened. She is allowed to be angry. She is allowed to think things that make her uncomfortable. She…
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Continue reading →: Musings on The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania by Hannah PakulaThe Last Romantic is not written through a rose-coloured lens. Marie is not presented as some flawless heroine who did everything right and somehow managed to save the country through sheer force of personality. She was complicated, sometimes contradictory, sometimes selfish, sometimes impulsive, and certainly not always what we would…
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Continue reading →: Musings on Reading and Feeling HomesickFor me, reading has created a homesickness that I cannot properly name. My home is not a country, nor a language, nor even a culture. It is an imagined territory assembled from everything I have read, loved, admired, and carried with me. Each book adds another small piece to that…
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Continue reading →: Musings on In Darkness and Light by Tudor AlexanderTold across braided timelines, In Darkness and Light traces Tina’s life from a fiercely hopeful Jewish girl in Romania to a woman shaped by the horror of war and loss and the pursuit of a better future.
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Continue reading →: Musings on A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn YangOver the past couple of years I’ve come across several debut novels that absolutely blew me away. This is one of them. If this is how Alice Evelyn Yang writes in her debut novel, I honestly cannot wait to see what she writes next. This is an incredibly strong first…
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Continue reading →: Musings on Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga TokarczukIn a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals…
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Continue reading →: Musings on The nightingale by Kristin HannahSet in France during World War II, The Nightingale follows two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, whose lives take very different paths under the German occupation.



