Stages of Grief
That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with. Not many authors can write an ironic, funny, touching and perceptive novel about the...
The reality of a tradwife influencer life
Natalie Heller Mills is our protagonist and she declares right at the opening of the book that “I am perfect at being alive” (p4). She starts out as being smug and self-congratulatory, but very quickly, the book reveals the much...
Constructing an Identity
When I reached my gate [..], I discovered there were a lot of Chinese American students boarding the United flight from Boston to Taipei [..]. They looked Chinese, but not Chinese Chinese. You could tell from the summer tans, the...
The Awkward Art of Socialising
There was a lot of discussion about white writers writing as black characters (Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, for example); this novel is about a man who writes the entire novel in the voice and first person narrator of a 57...
A Life in Letters
If you remember the days of sending and receiving physical letters in envelopes, then you are part of an ever-dwindling group, and likely to enjoy this lovely novel. It’s 2012, and seventy-three year old Sybil Van Antwerpt has a regular...
Children Die and Parents go on Living
Having just lost my own darling dad, I was looking for silver linings in the bereavement, and one such is that my father had expressed how burying one’s parents is the natural and right way, as they ‘pay their debt...
A doorstopper of a book
[1] Nebraska[2], by Monica Datta, looked intriguing and not just because (I assumed) it seemed to be an Indian immigrant story set in or related somehow to Nebraska – from a blurb about the book: Anna Chatterjee has just been...
Simplistic good people and villainous villains
I am one of those who absolutely loved Stockett’s debut novel, The Help. Yes, it was controversial – a white woman writing in the voices of black women – but I nevertheless thought The Help read very well, told a...
Race and magic in the New World
American origin novels tend to be about tough pioneers who brave nature as they head out west, or cowboys who roam the prairies with massive herds of cattle, or stern lawmen who bring order to the wild frontier. All of...
Misfits
I have liked many of Baker Kline’s novels, and I am so glad this latest is no exception. The story starts in the 1840s, in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Our protagonist, Sarah – Sallie – is a typical southern belle,...
Character-driven stories of a feudal, modern Pakistan
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s exquisite collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published in 2009. A mere 17 years later, his first novel, This is Where the Serpent Lives, has come out. For non-authors like myself, the long gap...
Facing Mortality with Dry Humour
A pocket sized book of not quite 100 pages, this is more short story than novel. But it is classic Alan Bennett. It is extremely British, very dry in its humour, ribald at times, and poignant too. The setting is...
Coal Miner’s Son
The day Gertie blew, I watched my father leave for work like I did every morning. It was called morning by the men who worked that shift, but to me it was still night, black and cold and silent except...
Extraordinary writing
This book is so hard to read that it is testament to the author’s skills that I continued to read it, avidly in fact, almost against my own wishes. Sarah Perry is writing of the death of her beloved father-in-law, his...
Taxi Driver
It’s always good to see South Asian-American novelists branching out from the immigrant-identity theme, so I was pleased to come across Yosha Gunasekara’s The Midnight Taxi, which promised something a little different. In this debut novel, Siriwathi Perera is a...
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