Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013

Switzerland My Father’s Book by Urs Widmer translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin “A fictionalized biography of [the author’s] own father, Walter Widmer, this novel is by turns heart-wrenching and laugh-out loud funny. Heady, intellectual passages alternate with slapstick comedy in this exploration of how much we can know even those closest to us.” —Tess Lewis Romania The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller translated from the German by Philip Boehm “Herta Müller’s masterpiece, The Hunger Angel, describes life in a Soviet forced-labor camp right after the war through a powerful, almost uncanny, melding of imagination and first-hand testimony.” —Bill Marx Metropolitan Books us.macmillan.com Seagull Books www.seagullbooks.org Iran Djibouti Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball “Djibouti. Such a fun word to say. And a place that most people couldn’t find on a map. But it’s home to one of the most interesting contemporary authors in Waberi, whose other books—The United States of Africa and Passage of Tears— are also worth reading.” —Chad Post Indiana University Press www.iupress.indiana.edu The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale “… its ‘alternative history’ of the revolution is passionately, powerfully nightmarish, a great literary achievement in addition to being a brave and important window onto a world of which English-readers are still all too ignorant.” —Deborah Smith Melville House www.mhpbooks.com UNBOUND 21

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