Woman's War against Progress

Allan Cameron was born in 1952, and grew up in Nigeria and Bangladesh, where he witnessed the toxic effects of so-called aid and neo-colonialism. As a young adult he lived in Italy and has translated twenty-six books - both novels and academic non-fiction - from Italian. He has written three novels: The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004), The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press, 2005) and Cinico (Vagabond Voices, 2017). He has also written two collections of short stories (2011 and 2012), two poetry collections (2009 and 2016), as well as non-fiction work on language, writing and printing, In Praise of the Garrulous (2008) and a collection of essays, Things Written Randomly in Doubt (2014).

[A Woman's War against Progress] is a majestic, always original work. I was most excited by passages where personalities drove stories, the relationships with Osip, for example, and with Andrei as interrogator. Giving the novel the voice of a 'First People' somebody opens a quite new way of feeling one's way into that Soviet period, too. All the parables and extended dialogues [are] well written, of course, and always striking in the social/political criticism they carry. But [they are] so massive and discursive that they slow everything down and feel like digressions, which they aren't. [It is suited to] the sort of intelligent reader in no hurry who would be happily captured and moved by The Woman. A Russian river of a novel. - Neal Ascherson ;; “I fear the readership for A Woman’s War against Progress may not be vast, but those who read it will find their minds stretched, challenged and enlarged by the experience. It’s a remarkable achievement, but I am not quite sure why I think that.” – James Robertson