Madam Vice President
~ The Truths we Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris ~ Penguin Random House, 2019 This biography was published in 2019, so this book is the story of Harris’ childhood and career till then: as district attorney for San...
Lisa
Suspense, stoicism and survival in wartime Britain: two novels by Pat Barker
~ Toby’s Room, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2012 ~ Noonday, by Pat Barker ~ Doubleday, 2016 It has been quite awhile since I read a Pat Barker novel, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to...
Coal Barger’s (Adopted) Daughter
Set in the 1820 or 1830s, in the Black Country (West Midlands of the UK, previously a coal mining region) this book is about ‘the noble art’ of fisticuffs, or pugilism, or as we know it today, boxing. Most unusually,...
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...
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...
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....
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...
An Obedient Woman
From the very start, the quality of the writing was obvious, which explained why it had been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker. The writing style is so distinctive it took me a page and a half, at least, to sync...
Lost in Translation
This book is supposedly an international bestseller, the debut novel about twenty-five year old Takako, niece of the owner of the 3rd generation Morisake Bookshop in Jimbocho, a part of Tokyo with more than 170 second hand bookshops, said to be...
A readable rehashing of stereotypes
This is by no means the worst of Umrigar’s novels, but it is not her best either. It is a very readable, pleasant novel, set within a Parsi community in Bombay. This novel is fairly conventional, the classic story of...
Clear and Distinctive as a Bell
The writing voice is clear and distinctive as a bell from the very start, a stream of consciousness which runs through the novel which is set within the space of a single day, very much in the Mrs Dalloway style....
Neither white enough nor Arabic enough, though she can pass for either
Isra is the child of a Palestinian (Falasteen) father and an American (white) mother. When her mother dies young (when Isra is only 8), and her father seemingly deserts them, she is brought into Amu and Amtu’s household (literally, uncle...
Confluent storylines on a Kerala river
Having read Verghese’s other novels (Cutting for Stone, The Tennis Partner, and My Own Country), I was fairly confident I would enjoy his latest, The Covenant of Water. However, I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I...
An island paradise 300 ft from mainland USA
It is immediately obvious why the novel is so titled, because Apple Island (42 acres, barely 300 feet from the mainland of the USA), despite seeming so bare and deprived, is a sort of paradise. The novel is set in...
If Intelligence and Advanced IQ are Taboo
This novel kicks off with the protagonist, Pearson, being told to take her child home from school because he used unacceptable language, namely, he said his classmate’s T-shirt was stupid – the forbidden S-word. In a dinner party that night,...
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