58 Great Books To Read This Summer, Recommended By Our Favorite Indie Booksellers yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Ultimate Summer Escape: Historical Fiction
New novels by turns salty, sweeping and sweet will transport you to 1930s Italy, 19th-century England and San Francisco a hundred years ago.
Credit.Ryan Gillett
May 27, 2021, 9:55 a.m. ET
If you think of historical fiction as a way of translating the past, does your perspective change when that fiction has been translated from another language? As some of the season’s best new historical novels suggest, this added dimension can make a book even richer, even more provocative. And none demonstrates that better than Frank Wynne’s translation of Alice Zeniter’s
THE ART OF LOSING (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 434 pp., $28), which won France’s Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Its central character is a young Frenchwoman attempting to reconnect with the Algeria that shaped and then silenced her paternal grandfather.
January 13, 2021
The displacement of children is a vexing problem in international and national politics. Italian author Viola Ardone’s novel explores issues surrounding children who are separated from their parents, but in this case, the families willingly send their youngsters away to live in the care of strangers.
The Children’s Train is the story of 7-year-old Amerigo Speranza, who lives with his mother in Naples after World War II, when the Germans occupied the city and the Allies bombed it to pieces. Food and new shoes became scarce, and Amerigo had to drop out of school. Then Italy’s Communist Party approached struggling Neapolitan families with an offer: Their children would be sent to Northern Italy to be cared for by wealthier families throughout the winter.