It is amazing what a good writer can pull off! This fairly short novel – just over 200 pages – would have us believe that our protagonist, child prodigy Colin Singleton, by the time he has graduated from high school,...
This is a quintessentially British novel, full of the most British of characters, with their eccentricities and oddities and charm. The landscape is recognisably and superbly British, the pace and charm understatedly British, the dialogue and characters even more so....
Having so enjoyed Beartown and its sequel Us Against Them, I was hoping for more of the same, but Anxious People appeared to be more in the style of The Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell...
You know how some novels are so good that as you are reading them, you are making a mental note to find more writing by the same author? Well, this is the opposite – I am making a mental note...
Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, deserves all its accolades. To successfully distill real life into fiction is something only highly gifted novelists can achieve, and that this was written by a debutant, is eye opening. It is...
As soon as I began this novel, I began to despair at how slim the volume felt in my hands, because this is the kind of read one hopes will last for many hours. Right from the outset, the plot...
This is Niven’s second Young Adult novel (though she has also written adult fiction and non-fiction), but the first one I have read by her – apparently, she was celebrated as a NY Times bestseller for All the Bright Places. I...
I was so pleased to begin this novel and find the protagonist is a 60 year old – Serenata, living with her 64 year old husband, Remington. Pleased because increasingly, it intrigues me to have a perspective of life from...
This is a novel set in Zamana, a (fictional) city in Pakistan, a place of violence and fear and mob riots and religious intolerances, where love still tries to flourish, where atrocities and human rights violations are daily fare, and yet...
The school bus seems an extremely hostile place, particularly at the back, from the start. Our protagonist, Park, starts out by pressing his earphones in and trying to plan music which may drown out the noise and slight bullying. This...
If ever a reader was seeking a book built on an excellent cast of characters, this will fit the bill beautifully! It is a book by a consummate storyteller, about a storyteller, and in an entirely unobtrusive but quietly pleasing...
Impossible not to pick up a book with such a title! And having read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, I was expecting good things – and was not disappointed. This time, our protagonist is Aza Holmes, and although...
This book is about a failed cross-cultural English-Pakistani marriage, which resulted in the Pakistani father spiriting his two children off to Karachi without letting the mother know where they had gone. The reader looking for a sensitive unpacking of cross-culture,...
Having been impressed by Silver Sparrow (2011) and An American Marriage (2018), I sought out Jones’s second novel, The Untelling (2005) (her debut novel is Leaving Atlanta, 2002). This novel once again features a young, black woman as protagonist, and...
One of those books you are glad your bookclub chose so that you read it! Trevor Noah is of course a well known public figure; this book gave a very comprehensive understanding of the South Africa he grew up in,...
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