Book review: Year of the Drought, by Roland Buti

The last few years have seen some notable triumphs for writers who believe that less is more. Perhaps most obviously, Austria’s Robert Seethaler made the Man Booker International shortlist in 2016 for A Whole Life, in which he somehow managed to concertina the epic, century-spanning story of a farmer turned cable car engineer turned soldier turned mountain guide into just 124 pages. Then there’s the Dutch author Otto De Kat (the pen-name of retired publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt) who pulled off a similar trick in his Second World War novellas Man on the Move (2004, 128 pages), Julia (2011, 194 pages) and News From Berlin (2014, 152 pages).