The most famous novel about an Australian sheep farm is probably The Thorn Birds, a melodramatic novel about forbidden love that still had a powerful sense of place (Germaine Greer described it as ‘the best bad book I’ve ever read’,...
From the outset, this is clearly a very thoughtfully put together novel. The author ponders how to render her characters’ names, characters who “move within various Chinese-speaking regions of the world”, to “denote their code-switching in a way that would...
David Davidar’s House of Blue Mangoes was published in 2001 and received excellent reviews. The cynic in me wondered whether reviewers were ever likely to criticize a debut novel from an author who also happened to be the CEO of...
This is a novel about Claire and Eliot, married for decades, when Claire enters the last few weeks or months of her life, stopping cancer treatment after 8 years. At the start of the novel, Claire drops her bombshell –...
Allegra Goodman’s Intuition was a delightful read. Set in a biomedical laboratory (and there are far too few books in such settings, but I might be biased), it focused on a young woman with a crush on an older postdoc...
This book is slightly curious for being one of those about a black girl, but her blackness is very much in the background of the story, not seemingly all that important to her life story at all. In fact, for...
People of my age might view the phenomenon of influencers with vague bewilderment. Who are these people, and why are they so famous? How do they make money? And why do people want to be influenced by them? Some, if...
I was warned not to bother reading this book, but having recently been rereading many of P.D James’ Adam Dalglish novels, and even a Cordelia Grey novel, and having been utterly thrilled anew by James’ artistry and craftsmanship, I threw...
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, an Afghan family moved to Pakistan as refugees. Years later in 1997, they migrated to Northern Virginia, arriving in the dead of winter, with no extended family to help. The small, tightly-knit Afghan...
Amy Chua is famous for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a sort of memoir, as well as recommendations for bringing up children. She is a legal scholar and has written two other books, World on Fire, about ethnic hatred...
I expect many readers have heard of and/or read Ann Patchett, but how many have heard of Lucy Grealy? I had not. Grealy wrote a well-received memoir, Autobiography of a Face, but only one, and she died young, which is...
Maybe it is typical of a Ken Follett novel that characters tend to be villains or heroes, to be two dimensional and typecast, because he mostly uses his characters as props to move his plotline swiftly along. In this novel...
Here’s my hypothesis: ‘normal’ life right now is so stressful, traumatic and chaotic that authors are tilting towards gentler plots that avoid dealing with current events. There was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake: a sweetly written story with no narrative tension...
This is maybe a novel for art lovers. The premise is interesting, that our protagonist is Mona, a precocious and charming 10 year old, quietly doing her math homework, suddenly loses her sight entirely. “She felt a dark shadow fall...
Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, set in 1950s Mississippi and focusing on the interactions between the black household help and their white employers, was a huge success. It was made into a film that was also hugely successful. The...
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