~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~ A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end. ,Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in...
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
~ The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell ~ Having read Purcell’s The Corset, perhaps my expectations for the same fine read in The Silent Companions were to set me up for a little disappointment. The novel takes place in three...
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
~ Sarong Party Girls, by Cheryl Li-Lien Tan ~ “Not say the States is very near, you know.” (translation: That is not to say the US is close to Singapore.) p145 “You see, ang mohs in Asia, step one is...
~ The Invoice, by Jonas Karlsson ~ An intensely Scandinavian book (in translation by Neil Smith) where the protagonist who is never named, is surprised one day to receive an invoice of 5,700,000 kroner. His life is much too small...
~ A Taxonomy of Love, by Rachel Allen ~ This is a young adults novel, but reads so well that this genre classification is of no relevance. That said, classification is on the title of this novel, and is a...
~ Perfect, by Rachel Joyce ~ Joyce’s distinctive writing style (from her bestsellers, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Henessey) is immediately apparent in her latest novel, Perfect. It is so named because...
~ The Wangs vs The World, by Jade Chang ~ This is quite a long novel, 49 chapters in 350 plus pages of close set typescript, but having finished it, it seems to have gone nowhere. The plotline runs that...
~ Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan ~ George Washington Black is the full name of our protagonist – though he is often called Wash by friends – who was born in 1818 in Barbados, a slave, and the son of a...
~ The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett ~ This is a classically excellent family saga. I always look immensely forward to any new Patchett novel, and this was no disappointment. The Dutch House of the title is a lavish and...
~ Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler ~ Anne Tyler’s writing often depicts relationships, particularly familial relationships, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is another wonderful novel in this vein. The novel begins with Pearl, who at about...
~ Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee ~ The novel begins with 22 year old protagonist Casey Han, who has just graduated from Princeton, coming home to Queens, where her Korean immigrant family have always lived, for a...
~ This Green and Pleasant Land, by Ayisha Malik ~ This novel is kept extremely lighthearted despite taking on some weighty issues in UK society (such as English identity, the rise of Islamophobia, village mentality, discrimination, hate crime, etc.) The...
~ We, the Survivors. By Tash Aw ~ We, The Survivors, is Tash Aw’s fourth novel, and his most accomplished by far. This work of fiction comes very close to being a little masterpiece. Its writing voice is assured, fluent,...
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