The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 during President Obamas last year in office after 8 scandal-free years (we can only marvel, but sadly). To honour David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect who designed the...
Nayantara Roy’s debut novel is a nicely complex addition to the Indo-American fiction genre. Her protagonist, Lila De, was born in Kolkata and lived there until she was 16, when she moved to America to join her father and stepmother...
Everything can be beautiful with the right eyes and ears. Every genre of music. Every sorrow and every pleasure. Every inhale and exhale. Every guitar solo. Every voice. Every plant beside the tarmac. If you find the above sentiment moving...
I didn’t like the word indifferent either. It was just two letters off from the word that I hate. Joanna, the protagonist in Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, has similarities to this same author’s protagonist in Rental House. Both protagonists...
Elizabeth Harris’ first novel has an unusual pair of main characters: a long-married gay married couple in New Jersey, one of whom has drifted politically rightwards over the years and now decides to run for Congress as a Republican. His...
Anyone who loves the Great British BakeOff will be tempted by this novel, set around a baking show with amateur contestants in a large tent. In this novel the baking show is set in America, but it is as English...
In the early 2000s, Stephanie Land found herself the single mother of a small child, out of a broken relationship with the child’s father, with a high school education, and no job skills. She needed to make a living for...
Inter-culture marriages and the conflicts therein are solid fodder for novels, and many authors have explored their literary potential: Celeste Ng, Laila Lalami, Chimamanda Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi just for starters. In Rental House, Weike Wang...
In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and...
There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun,...
Every parent’s worst nightmare: a missing child. In Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You, the reader is not kept in suspense about what happened to 16-year-old Lydia, who lives with her family in a peaceful small Ohio college...
Some great books have been made into wonderful films. Some have suffered greatly in the transition from page to screen. Here’s my take in no particular order, what’s yours? Great book, great film Great book -> Disastrous film/TV Terrible book...
The largest concentration of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States is found in and around Washington DC, and that’s where this novel is set. The protagonist, Mamush (a fond family nickname) is Ethiopian-American, born and raised in the US, but...
~ The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl ~ Penguin Random House, 2024 Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of her readers must have been like me: a...
~ Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only...
Recent Comments