Pain and Glory
Having been very impressed by Abbott’s The End of Everything, I was thrilled to get hold of another of her novels. This one is about ballet and ballerinas. Not a world I know anything about, but Abbott is a consummately...
Lisa
Outsidership, through the prism of friendship
Having read and loved all Kamila Shamsie’s novels, I was thrilled to get my hands on her latest, Best of Friends. Even better, the blurb suggested it was going to be a read similar to Kartography, one of Shamsie’s earlier...
The Pennington half-siblings
This is a fun read, but not to be taken entirely seriously. It starts with an introduction of the vast cast, of Cyril Pennington’s five children and their mothers. His eldest and youngest, Nikisha and Prynce have the same Jamaican...
Appalachian grit
This is one of those utterly charming books which conjure up a particular place and time so well that it transports the reader into that world. Set in the Appalachian mountains, this novel depicts a very deprived community in Baines...
Life in Translation
There have been increasing numbers of Koreans writers in English in this century, and there is no doubt that they are collectively conveying a very distinct identity for the Korean diaspora in fiction. There are themes common to many immigrant...
Redemption, Down Under
The book cover has a wonderful evocative image, of a lone sailing ship on wide open seas under a massive, looming sky which takes up four fifths of the image. The colour of the skies are ominous above, with massive...
Potter’s clay
Debuting with An Atlas of Impossible Longings (2008), Roy has steadily published 5 novels over about 14 years; The Earth Spinner in 2022 is her most recent. Each of her novels have been of good quality, well written, non-stereotypical, full...
Quiet desperation in the suburbs
This book starts off with an interesting scenario, that our protagonist, Alison, on a dark, rainy night after a party, having taken the wrong route home and now slightly lost, pulled out into a four way intersection, the other car...
A short-lived Medici teenager
This latest Maggie O’Farrell novel is once again a work of historical fiction, like Hamnet, and even more riveting. Now the reader finds themselves in the mid-1500s, Renaissance Italy. Our protagonist is Lucrezia, fifth child of Cosimo D’Medici of Florence....
Color Changes
Picking this new release up at the Martin Luther King Jr Library in DC, I was a little surprised by how small and slim this volume looked. Not only does this novel only have 180 pages – making it relatively...
Enchanting Irish novella
From the start, this novella was so enchanting that I only dreaded how small and slim it was, meaning the read would not last very long at all. I do not hesitate to say already from the first chapter, I...
Provocative, amusing, magic realism
In all fairness to the author, I should start this review with a weaselly disclaimer of sorts: that I do not think this review will do justice to the novel or author, because I don’t fully grasp the genre, nor...
Three generations of Filipino-Americans
This is a refreshingly original and very in depth, detailed look into the diasporic Filipino community in the USA. Castillo conveys a large amount of not just cultural practises and norms, but the different values and codes of conduct and...
Tech Incubators, Religious algorithms
Having read Tahmina Anam’s previous three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, Bones of Grace, sometimes known as the Bengal Trilogy), I was surprised (but not unpleasantly) by this one. Anam’s work in the past had been characterised by...
Tales of short-term, commitment-free jobs
Although this is a novel translated from Japanese into English, the writing is of such good quality that it makes very good reading, even if perhaps not the same reading experience as in its original language. Nevertheless, it imparts a...
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