Life in Translation: A novel - Softcover

The narrator looks back on the muddle of his life as a literary translator. He dreams of finding literary fame while toiling away at his translation of an important but dauntingly bleak Peruvian novel. At one point he earns a living by working for a large multinational company whose hidebound hierarchy infuriates him. With his professional ambitions frustrated, his dead-end jobs take him London and Lima, Paris and Madrid, Leiden and back to London. His edgy relationships with friends, family, colleagues and lovers seem to go nowhere. The story is told through a mosaic of interlinked episodes that together create a picture of the narrator's bumpy road to maturity. Finally, he realises, painfully, that he, a translator, is prone to `misreadings': of his own strengths and weaknesses, of the women in his life, of the viability of his translation career, of the options open to him. Can a chance meeting in a Dutch town with a key figure from his past bring some much-desired clarity?

Anthony Ferner was professor of international human resource management at De Montfort University and was head of research in the Faculty of Business and Law for 12 years. He retired in 2014. His short story `The Cat It Is That Dies' appeared in the anthology The Sea In Birmingham, edited by Gaynor Arnold and Julia Bell and published by Tindal Street Fiction Group in 2013. This story became the basis of his novella Winegarden, published in 2015 by Holland Park Press. Another of Anthony Ferner's short stories, `The tanks', was shortlisted for the Irish Times summer short story competition in 2014. His second novella, Inside the Bone Box, was published by Fairlight Books in 2018. He has been a member of the Tindal Street Fiction Group, based in Birmingham, since 2010.