Post Type Archives: VBC Events

As the author myself of a book on the fascinating history and culture of Calabria, Italy, My Two Italies – which Marra graciously mentioned in his Acknowledgments – I was immediately drawn to this contemporary novel about how a female immigrant from this poor region of southern Italy was able to transform Hollywood’s male power structure. But Mercury Pictures […]

The name – and the writing – of this author is perhaps already familiar to many of you. Rushdie burst onto the literary scene in 1981 with his remarkable Midnight’s Children, a fictional account of India’s transition from British colonial rule to independence and then partition. Winner of the “Best of the Booker,” the novel is […]

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Steinbeck in 1962, “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” Indeed, I know of few writers who have been as capable as Steinbeck in combining searing realism with a remarkable sympathy, even warmth, for his characters as he explores some […]

For seven-year-old Salim, the pillars upholding his small universe – his indifferent father, his adored uncle, his treasured books, the daily routines of government school and Koran lessons – seem unshakeable. But it is the 1970s, and the winds of change are blowing through Zanzibar: suddenly Salim’s father is gone, and the island convulses with […]

I’ve long been under the spell of this novel, which like another VBC selection, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, incorporates motifs from Gothic fiction, while also transforming these haunted, macabre elements into a timeless tale about forbidden love and the existential scarring caused by undying passion. Born into a remarkable literary family that included her sisters the […]