Anne Zouroudi, The Messenger of Athens, 2007

Set on the fictional Greek island of Thiminos, after just thirty pages this present-day murder mystery involving an illicit love affair becomes quietly compelling, probably because Zouroudi’s attention to the detail of the landscape is what gives this book its delicate atmosphere. Then there are the people, with their everyday Greek tragedies in which superstition and gender roles are entrenched and emotionally suffocating. Zouroudi’s characterisation is also good, particularly in the clear depiction of the mannerisms of the investigator Hermes Diaktoros and how they contrast with his mysterious and unexplained background (he is in fact the book’s biggest mystery), always hinting at a ‘higher power’, which may account for the way he gets people to just open up to him with the truth. At times it feels like this debut novel may be heading into Paulo Coelho territory, but it’s reassuringly far more down to Earth than that. Recommended.  PY

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Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991

Esperanza Cordero is a young Mexican girl growing up in a 1960s Chicago tenement, not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks but poor nonetheless, and desolate Mango Street is the place she needs to escape from. This series of forty-six first-person vignettes captures defining moments and experiences often with pinpoint sharpness, and it’s also noticeable how the writing increases in sophistication as Esperanza becomes more mature, as her family and friends move on and her perception of her own young life becomes gradually more muted and melancholy under the gentle weight of added layers. A book that has sold three million copies worldwide, vibrantly written with prose that often captures the time and place with a near perfect clarity.  PY

MORE ON SANDRA CISNEROS : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Antonio Skármeta, Il Postino, 1985

Formerly a journalist, Skármeta originally called his novel Ardiente Paciencia, then El Cartero de Neruda, then after the success of the 1994 film (actually the second film of the book) simply Il Postino. He recounts a Chilean postman’s friendship with the world’s greatest love poet, Pablo Neruda, and how Neruda unlocked the teenage postman’s own romantic creativity in his pursuit of the beautiful Beatriz González. The story was drawn from personal experience after Skármeta was asked by his newspaper editor to dig up some scandal on Neruda, the end result being a whole different story. I was rather pleased that the book goes a lot further than the film, which was heavy on sweetness yet decisive about what kind of film it was actually meant to be, and by the film’s relocation of the story to Capri in the Mediterranean (where Neruda sat out his exile from Chile for his communism in the 1950s) it was able to omit the book’s strong undercurrent of bitterness caused by the rise of Pinochet. The romantic and the political don’t make good bedfellows in this book and sadly the political wins out, a sweet fantasy killed off by a bitter, fascist political reality. Well written and entertaining for the most part, with surprisingly darker tones than the film.   PY