Slices of Life
Allegra Goodman’s Intuition was a delightful read. Set in a biomedical laboratory (and there are far too few books in such settings, but I might be biased), it focused on a young woman with a crush on an older postdoc...
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.
My kid’s famous. Let’s ride this train.”
People of my age might view the phenomenon of influencers with vague bewilderment. Who are these people, and why are they so famous? How do they make money? And why do people want to be influenced by them? Some, if...
Honor killing?
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, an Afghan family moved to Pakistan as refugees. Years later in 1997, they migrated to Northern Virginia, arriving in the dead of winter, with no extended family to help. The small, tightly-knit Afghan...
The Grasshopper and the Ant
I expect many readers have heard of and/or read Ann Patchett, but how many have heard of Lucy Grealy? I had not. Grealy wrote a well-received memoir, Autobiography of a Face, but only one, and she died young, which is...
A Domestic Bubble
Here’s my hypothesis: ‘normal’ life right now is so stressful, traumatic and chaotic that authors are tilting towards gentler plots that avoid dealing with current events. There was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake: a sweetly written story with no narrative tension...
Desperate women
Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, set in 1950s Mississippi and focusing on the interactions between the black household help and their white employers, was a huge success. It was made into a film that was also hugely successful. The...
Wiping Out in Southern California
Taylor Jenkins Reid has both fame and fortune, as the author of the bestselling The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and also Daisy Jones and the Six, which went on to become an Amazon Prime TV series. She is prolific,...
Wild in the water
In 1950, Gavin Maxwell moved to a cottage on the West Coast of Scotland, into a small house standing isolated near the sea. His memoir, Ring of Bright Water, about the place and the animals he shared it with, became...
Family secrets? Sisterhood? Colonialism? All of the above?
I admit to picking up this book solely because of its quirky title, expecting something along the lines of departmental shenanigans in a university Literature or Asian Studies department, and was therefore quite surprised that this novel is actually set...
Off the Grid
Groups of people have chosen to live in communes of one kind or another for centuries. Their rationale has been diverse: discontent with governments or the ratrace, escapes from unpleasant situations, sharing to reduce the financial burdens, or shared spiritual...
Moral Ambiguity in Times of Desperation
Dystopian fiction is far from uncommon in these times, but Megha Majumdar’s second novel stands out because of its plausibility. Here are no plump suburbanites turned feral vigilantes, or fearful tribes with survivalist tyrants leading them: this novel, A Guardian...
Bad Decisions and Misery
9 months pregnant in Portland Oregon, with a low level job in tech and a husband who is an unsuccessful actor, Annie is in Ikea buying a crib when The Big One — the massive earthquake that is predicted to...
‘The sexiest flowers on earth’
The Orchid Thief of the title is John Laroche: a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. Susan Orlean wrote about him for...
A House of Contemplation
I don’t think there are many novels about nuns, and that too, nuns who are not out and about in schools and hospitals, but those who retire to a nunnery to pray and work in solitude and isolation. One would...
Love and reconciliation, but also bitterness and anger
There’s a small flood of books by Indian-American authors in the last few years that are specifically about the second-generation Indian-American experience. Other Indian-American novelists have spanned multiple generations (Well-Behaved Indian Women, by Saumya Dave), some simply feature Indian characters...
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