John Baker’s Blog

Per Petterson’s stunning fourth novel, Out Stealing Horses, translated by Anne Born, won the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize. To Siberia is the author’s second novel, published in 1998 and also translated by Anne Born.
To Siberia opens with the narrator, a little girl of six or seven, and her brother, Jesper, on the coast of North [...]

Some people have confidence from the word go. They are born into the world and have a quick squint at it between womb and cradle and think to themselves, Hey, I can handle this. No problem. It’s as if they’ve arrived here from a much worse place and they know they’ve landed on their feet. [...]

Blaise White was reading this book in Norway during the summer, so when I saw it on the counter at my local bookshop I bought a copy. The full title is The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets. Aldo Buzzi first published it in Milano in 1979 and it was eventually translated into English in 2005.
I [...]