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A Month in Siena |
I read this soon after a spending a few days in Siena with my husband when we too had explored and appreciated the art and architecture. I enjoyed sharing his visit and his responses to the art that had come to mean so much to him over the years after the abduction of his father. Despite his grief over the loss, contemplating these paintings gave him hope about the importance of art, life and love.
(Christine Miller - bwl 119 Winter 2026) |
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My Friends |
Matar gently and affectionately examines the friendship of three young Libyan men who, as students in the UK, met at the time of the disastrous anti-Gaddafi demonstrations outside the Libyan Embassy there. The narrator Khaled, in a reflective walk through the neighbourhood they shared as young men, details poignantly the complexities of the eventual choices made by the 3 individuals at the time and in the decades following their displacement.
(Margaret Teh - bwl 114 Autumn 2024) |
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The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between |
This memoir deals with a search for the author's Father a leader of the opposition to the Gaddafi regime who was handed over to them by Egypt and then disappeared. It is beautifully told and is a labour of anguished love. The author is also a fine novelist and will point readers to his other work. Libya is now free but broken.
(David Graham - bwl 84 Spring 2017) |
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