Madam Vice President

This biography was published in 2019, so this book is the story of Harris’ childhood and career till then:  as district attorney for San Francisco, then as California’s attorney general, before becoming California’s US Senator. One reads keeping in mind...

Classes under a canopy of trees

This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. Shivani’s Amader Shantiniketan is one of those books where the foreword is almost as interesting as the book itself. This is not surprising, since the foreword is...

Jackson Brodie, at 60.

A new Kate Atkinson novel! And that too, featuring the inimitable Jackson Brodie, who I feared had retired forever at the end of Big Sky! The opening of Atkinson’s latest, Death at the Sign of a Rook, was a bit...

Wickedly funny satire

In the introduction, Lynne Truss calls this novel a masterpiece, and so it is. Truss however does not agree with common opinion that it is necessarily a parody of Mary Webb’s rural novels which were popular in the 1920s and...

“A weird boy wonderland”

Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative. Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. […] By the time they grew to be adults, many were...

Intimate and revealing conversations

It is with great pleasure I now know of yet another wonderful writer and storyteller, Nathan Hill. This is the first book of his that I have come across (Wellness is Hill’s 2nd novel), and after this, I fully intend to read...

Solvitur Ambulando

“It is solved by walking” — attributed to St Augustine, circa 400 AD Rachel Joyce’s first novel is one of those quintessentially British, slightly quaint, gentle, a tad sentimental, but still charming stories. It is described as being about ‘an...

The Consequences of Choices Made

The title of this book is singularly apt. Choice is not a novel, rather it is 3 long, short-stories, 2 set in London and 1 in Bangladesh, which all show individuals making choices, and the constrains and consequences of those choices....

A lost generation

In 1985, at the beginning of this novel, several young men attend a memorial wake in Chicago. This is not a standard memorial service; it is a party, held at the same time as the official funeral several miles away....

The Color of Me

While one may disagree about Booker Prize winners, amongst the other shortlisted novels for the prize, there are usually some gems to be found. In the 2023 shortlist, Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is wonderfully detached, telling of a Jewish woman...

Redemption Song

Say the word ‘Rastafarian’, and many people will think of Bob Marley and reggae. Beyond the catchy, unmistakeable rhythm of the songs, few people in America, including myself, know much about the Rastafari religion. Safiya Sinclair’s arresting new memoir, How...