Witch trials
This novel set in a small village in Scotland, Kilgoyne, featuring the protagonist, Majorie Crowe, whom the villagers think is between 60 and 70 years of age, “They think me to divorced or a lifelong spinster, that I used to...
Fine dining with an unusual chef
The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 during President Obamas last year in office after 8 scandal-free years (we can only marvel, but sadly). To honour David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect who designed the...
Cat’s Cradle
There have been so many Japanese books in translation available of recent years that I have ended up reading a good many myself, such as Sayata Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Meiko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series of Before...
Secrets and Lies in a Crumbling Kolkata Mansion
Nayantara Roy’s debut novel is a nicely complex addition to the Indo-American fiction genre. Her protagonist, Lila De, was born in Kolkata and lived there until she was 16, when she moved to America to join her father and stepmother...
Seville oranges and sugar make a pleasant, if imperfect, pot
Being a lover of marmalade, this title and its glorious front cover of 9 marmalade pots intrigued me. The story is of the fictional descendants of John Keiller, of Dundee Marmalade fame. As any marmalade eater will know, marmalade is...
Oceanic Superpowers
Everything can be beautiful with the right eyes and ears. Every genre of music. Every sorrow and every pleasure. Every inhale and exhale. Every guitar solo. Every voice. Every plant beside the tarmac. If you find the above sentiment moving...
Delicious drawing-room dialogue, but lacking in charm
Here is yet another example of a writer who produced a stunningly good debut novel (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), and whose 2nd (The Summer Before the War) and now 3rd novel have been somewhat disappointing subsequently. There are of course many...
Joan is different, and that is just fine
I didn’t like the word indifferent either. It was just two letters off from the word that I hate. Joanna, the protagonist in Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, has similarities to this same author’s protagonist in Rental House. Both protagonists...
Medical Injustice
““When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt in my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (p141). These are the words of Dr Civil Townsend, in 2016 when she is already...
Politically mixed marriages
Elizabeth Harris’ first novel has an unusual pair of main characters: a long-married gay married couple in New Jersey, one of whom has drifted politically rightwards over the years and now decides to run for Congress as a Republican. His...
An unexpected and disturbing visitor
Into the mundanity and trudge of Sam’s and Elena’s lives comes a bear. Sam and Elena live in San Juan with this ailing mother in a increasingly dilapidated house. Since Sam was 16 and Elena 18, they have been taking...
Not worth the calories
Anyone who loves the Great British BakeOff will be tempted by this novel, set around a baking show with amateur contestants in a large tent. In this novel the baking show is set in America, but it is as English...
Personal and political in post-apartheid South Africa
I am coming to this book a quarter of a century after it won the Booker Prize in 1999. Heaven knows how many years this relatively slim volume has been in my boxes, carried around from house move to house...
From the trenches of minimum-wage existence
In the early 2000s, Stephanie Land found herself the single mother of a small child, out of a broken relationship with the child’s father, with a high school education, and no job skills. She needed to make a living for...
Lost in a Blissful Translation
“The Hanuman Chalisa by Tulsidas is one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the world. Tens of millions of people recite it by heart, and chant it daily, as well as in times singularly joyful or sorrowful—or when they...
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