Mini Literature Party

Entries in and after a quick nap, I picked Maps for Lost Lovers which, judging by the first two pages is going to be a fine read.  It’s a rich tapestry of imagery and prose so far and having heard good things about this book, I look forward to diving further into the story, the synopsis of which is here:

In an unnamed town Jugnu and his lover Chanda have disappeared. Rumours abound in the close-knit Pakistani community, and then on a snow-covered January morning Chanda’s brothers are arrested for murder. Telling the story of the next twelve months, Maps for Lost Lovers opens the heart of a family at the crossroads of culture, community, nationality and religion, and expresses their pain in a language that is arrestingly poetic.

On a different note, just after picking this book up, another one thumped onto the doormat.  The House of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez is a small but delightful looking book and as I’m in generous mood, you can have the blurb for that too…

In the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge academic who has just acquired a copy of Emily Dickinson’s Poems from a second-hand bookshop in Soho, is knocked down and killed at a crossroads. Following Bluma’s death, a colleague finds in her house a copy of Conrad’s The Shadow Line inscribed with a mysterious dedication and crusted around the edges with what appears to be cement. Intrigued, the colleague begins an investigation which will take him on a journey from Cambridge to Buenos Aires and across the River Plate to Montevideo as he hunts for clues to the identity and fate of an obscure and dedicated bibliophile. He learns the story of Carlos Brauer, a man whose obsession for books is all consuming. Vast bookcases fill his rooms from end to end, floor to ceiling, forcing his car out of the garage and even himself out of his bedroom and in to the attic. Books are arranged according to a strict system: Shakespeare cannot be placed next to Marlowe, because of accusations of plagiarism between the two, and Martin Amis cannot sit alongside Julian Barnes. All becomes dependent upon a complex indexing system, which will ultimately prove to be the undoing of this man of books.

Anyway on that note, happy reading for the day and week folks!

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