All The Single Ladies
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,...
Susan
I live in Maryland, work as a scientist, was born and grew up in India, and have a house full of books. I read across categories: a lot of fiction, any good writing, novels by and about women, science fiction, fantasy, South Asian novels, and nonfiction. For about twenty years, in my spare time, I managed the now-defunct SAWNET (South Asian Women's NETwork) website. Some of the reviews from that site are republished here.
What’s it like, being different? “People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.”
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...
Book->Film
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...
A donut with a hole where something solid should be
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...
Delectable food, but insipid novel
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...
Theater of Espionage
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....
Ripples in the lives of the Red River Valley
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...
Crimes on the Reservation
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...
Classes under a canopy of trees
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...
Jackson Brodie, at 60.
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...
A functionary in the Raj
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...
“A weird boy wonderland”
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...
Solvitur Ambulando
“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...
A lost generation
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....
Redemption Song
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...
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