Seamus Heaney's Human Chain is a book in which every word is at once a surprise and exactly the right word!
#15.
Edmund de Waal's memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes covers the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and takes the reader from the Ukraine to Vienna to Paris and to England via the Ephrussi banking family. It is gripping and surprising.
#16.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a very short novella, will reward anyone who has been to Mendoza and/or anyone who ever thinks about the relationship between reality and the reconstruction of reality in a work of art. It follows an actual German landscape painter's trip to Argentina in the nineteenth century and contains a roaring adventure.
#17.
If you ever had an interest in Isaac Bashevis Singer and the world of Polish Jewry out of which he emerged, as well as the very ambivalent relationship of non-Jewish Poles to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, read the fascinating Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland by Agata Tusynska.
