SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Red Hands by Colin Sargent
Love, loss and rueful laughter in Ceauscescu-era Romania
Iordana Ceauscescu
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
HAZ de necaz. The term – Romanian for rueful laughter – fittingly appears a number of times in this novel. It pretty much describes Red Hands’ tone – tragedy hardened further by comedy.
After his extraordinary second novel The Boston Castrato, Colin Sargent shifts his intelligent and sharp focus from the US of the 1920s to the Romania of the 1960s onwards.
Employing a part-autobiographical, part-fictionalised first-person account, he empathetically describes the troubled life of Iordana Ceauscescu, wife of Valentin, the eldest child of Nicolae and Elena.
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