political fiction

Book Reviews

• Heinrich Böll: Women in a River Landscape
  A Novel in Dialogues and Soliloquies
• Javier Cercas: Soldiers of Salamis
  - villains and heroes of the Spanish Civil War
• Simin Daneshvar: Savushun*
  A Novel About Modern Iran
• Yury Dombrovsky: The Faculty of Useless Knowledge*
  - a novel of Stalin's 1937 terror
• Duong Thu Huong: Paradise of the Blind
  - growing up in a Vietnamese family riven by politics
• Per Olov Enquist: The March of the Musicians
  - a novel about labour unrest in Sweden's bleak north
• Juan Goytisolo: Marks of Identity*
  - youth between Franco's Spain and exile
• Juan Goytisolo: The Marx Family Saga**
  - Karl Marx faces the failure of communism
• Stefan Heym: The Queen Against Defoe
  And Other Stories
• Tahar ben Jelloun: This Blinding Absence of Light*
  - surviving incarceration in a secret Moroccan prison
• Danilo Kis: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich*
  - dark stories of revolutionaries betrayed
• Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon**
  - the interrogation and confession of an Old Bolshevik
• George Konrád: The City Builder*
  - a planner's life in a provincial Eastern European town
• Ahmadou Kourouma: The Suns of Independence*
  - a tale of Malinke tradition in an independent Africa
• Ahmadou Kourouma: Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote**
  - the life story of an African dictator
• Jaan Kross: The Conspiracy and Other Stories
  - Estonia in the Second World War
• Torgny Lindgren: Bathsheba
  - an earthy, mytho-poetic novel about the later days of King David
• Scholastique Mukasonga: Our Lady of the Nile
  - racial tensions mount in a Rwandan girls' school
• Multatuli: Max Havelaar
  Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company
• George Orwell: Animal Farm*
  - political allegory in a farmyard fable
• Orhan Pamuk: Snow
  - an novel about a coup in a provincial Turkish town
• Mesa Selimovic: Death and the Dervish**
  - a spiritual crisis amidst Ottoman Bosnian politics
• Victor Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev**
  - the outstanding novel of Stalin's purges
• Francis Spufford: Red Plenty*
  Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream
• Antonio Tabucchi: Declares Pereira*
  - a political awakening in 1938 Portugal
• Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversation in the Cathedral**
  - a novel about power and politics in Peru in the early 1950s
• Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance**
  - art and politics in pre-WWII Germany and Spain
• Yi Mun-yol: Our Twisted Hero*
  - a struggle for power in a Korean classroom

See also: war fiction