CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Fascinating language explorations with a global reach
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Babel: Around the World In 20 Languages
by Gaston Dorren
(Profile Books, £14.99)
IT SEEMED like far-flung whimsy when Douglas Adams created the Babel fish, a universal language translator, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The idea is nonetheless revisited in Gaston Dorren’s whirlwind tour of mother tongues, in which the author suggests that the silicon translator being developed by Google could help bring English’s status as a lingua franca to an end.
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