ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Letters from Latin America: September 23, 2019
Fiction and poetry from Giusseppe Caputo, Juan Villoro, Carlos Andres Gomez and Mario Montalbetti
Exceptional debut: Giuseppe Caputo
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
THERE are books that stay with you long after you put them down and one of them is An Orphan World (Charco Press, £9.99), the debut novel from Colombian writer Giuseppe Caputo. Rich in images, registers and nuances, it's a book you can almost read as a long, lyrical poem.
In it, a father and his son attempt to survive poverty by moving into a poorer neighbourhood near the sea, possibly somewhere in Latin America.
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