Blogs in May 2020

Zeno’s Conscience 1st May 2020

This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his...

Read More 

A Perfect Mother 13th July 2018

During a visit to Trieste in Northern Italy to research his long lost great-grandfather, Jacob meets Charlotte and Jane, and the three are forced to confront their individual and shared histories. Their sense of themselves is challenged and they...

Read More 

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere 13th February 2018

Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Here, her...

Read More 

Flashpoint Trieste 26th May 2017

In the last days of World War II, Allied armies in Italy race to beat Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav forces to the strategically vital Adriatic port of Trieste. The ancient city is now a major flashpoint in the new Cold...

Read More 

New Finnish Grammar 1st January 1970

After a badly wounded sailor with amnesia is discovered washed up on the quay in Trieste after the Second World War, he’s taken back to Helsinki by a Finnish doctor in an attempt to rebuild his identity. Together they...

Read More