I finished reading Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums last weekend. There’s a disturbing childlike quality to the writing, which reminded me a little of Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring – the sense of pervasive threat, a thread of brutal violence beneath the sometimes fairytale atmosphere. I did find the novel difficult to get into at first, and then I worry that it’s my fault for not reading with enough care. But it has a cumulative power. A very dark, rather bleak book – ideal summer reading!