Foster Care Indictment
~ My Name is Why, by Lemn Sissay ~ This novel is an indictment of the children’s foster care and care services in UK. Sissay tells the story of how he was taken away as a baby from his Ethiopian...
Lisa
A sassy, articulate, intelligent, flighty woman
~ Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams ~ Queenie Jenkins is a young black woman (2nd generation Jamaican) from south London (the geography is important to her) working in journalism (The Daily Read, culture section) in London. London’s multiculturalism and segregation are...
Exacting rules for single women
~ A Single Thread, by Tracy Chevalier ~ Another triumph by Chevalier. This is a beautifully worked piece almost in miniature, set in Winchester in the early 1930s, against the backdrop of a country still recovering from the great war...
Marsh Girl Resilience
~ Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens ~ Kya is a fiercely lovable protagonist in her strength, resilience, vulnerability, and thirst for knowledge. This novel is set in two periods, but in the same geographical location – the marshes...
Raw Poetry
~ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong ~ Gorgeous is a good description for the beautiful language in this novel. But difficult could be another word, to describe the storyline. I confess I read the novel while only...
Poignant and Prosaic
~Inheritance, by Jenny Éclair ~ This tale encompassing 4 generations begins with the inauspicious marriage of in the 1930s of aristocratic but skint Teddy Carmichael (the younger son of a younger son) and Margaret (Peggy) Oppenheimer, a wealthy American. Despite...
Brown Man in a White Man’s City
~ Amnesty, by Arvind Adiga ~ Amnesty is vintage Adiga. Need I say more? After the disappointment of Selection Day (which was by no means awful, just less accessible!), it is a joy to go back to the powerful, punchy,...
Love, family, nature
~ A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House ~ An Irish descendent riding up Rosebud Mountain to clear the land passes an eighteen year old Cherokee girl of such stunning looks that he cannot get her out of his mind:...
Life changes in Nairobi
~ A Change in Altitude, by Anita Shreve ~ Patrick (from Chicago) and Margaret (from Boston) meet and fall in love, and after 2 years together – “married five months” – move to Kenya. Paul is a medical man who...
Dangers of oversimplification
~ 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...
“Champor-champor” culture
~ 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...
Predictable Gothic
~ 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...
A Turbulent World
~ 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...
Engaging kopitiam reading
~ 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...
Dues must be paid
~ 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...
Recent Comments