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...
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 thousand miles away from the restaurants she reviewed, and far below the...
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 comparatively few bridges to get you from one maze to another....
Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. I’d read only two of her books, The Round House and LaRose, and both were gorgeous, deeply emotional without being sentimental, suffused with the spirit and environment of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Native Americans...
The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant...
This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. Shivani’s Amader Shantiniketan is one of those books where the foreword is almost as interesting as the book itself. This is not surprising, since the foreword is...
A new Kate Atkinson novel! And that too, featuring the inimitable Jackson Brodie, who I feared had retired forever at the end of Big Sky! The opening of Atkinson’s latest, Death at the Sign of a Rook, was a bit...
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative. Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. […] By the time they grew to be adults, many were...
“It is solved by walking” — attributed to St Augustine, circa 400 AD Rachel Joyce’s first novel is one of those quintessentially British, slightly quaint, gentle, a tad sentimental, but still charming stories. It is described as being about ‘an...
In 1985, at the beginning of this novel, several young men attend a memorial wake in Chicago. This is not a standard memorial service; it is a party, held at the same time as the official funeral several miles away....
Say the word ‘Rastafarian’, and many people will think of Bob Marley and reggae. Beyond the catchy, unmistakeable rhythm of the songs, few people in America, including myself, know much about the Rastafari religion. Safiya Sinclair’s arresting new memoir, How...
Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls was a wonderful collection of short stories (see Reeta’s review), but it’s a big step from short stories to a full-length novel, and not every novelist can do it well. Freudenberger, however, is one of those...
A novel not just about libraries or bookstores, but specifically about a Little Free Library! Who could resist? Well, not me at least. Set in a small Georgia town, this novel hits every one of the cultural hot-button issues of...
When we left Eilis at the end of Colm Toibin’s lovely Brooklyn, she had just departed the small Irish town of Enniscorthy to return to her husband in New York; the Italian husband that no one in Ireland knew about,...
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