SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
My Brother the Messiah
Thought-provoking parable of dystopian times to come
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
MARTIN VOPENKA’S previous novel The Fifth Dimension is a troubling, comfortless and problematic book — and that description largely applies to the Czech writer’s latest, in an astringent translation by Anna Bryson Gustova.
Written from the viewpoint of protagonist Marek, My Brother the Messiah weaves back and forth across the decades of a dystopian 22nd century.
During that time, a botched technological attempt to arrest global warming has resulted instead in a new ice age. As polar conditions spread southwards, massive European migrations begin as Scandinavians head to the centre of the continent and then, as conditions worsen, whole Czech and Austrian populations escape in turn to Greece.
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