A Portrait of Two Marriages
~ The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller ~ Sue Miller’s novel follows two very different women who happen to live next door to one another in a university town. And their two very different marriages. Meri and Nathan are a...
Susan
Life under a Microscope
Novels about biochemists are rare. Novels about gay black biochemists are surely nonexistent, until now; in this slender niche appears Real Life, a truly unusual first novel. Set over the course of a long weekend in an unnamed midwestern American...
Atmospheric edginess
Every novel by Tana French is a gem, but for me, Faithful Place has an edge over the rest. In her Dublin Murder Squad series of six books (so far), French specializes in crimes where one of the detectives has...
A Life in 143 pages
In spare, evocative prose, Mary Costello traces the life of her protagonist, Tess Lohan, from her childhood in Ireland through decades of her life in New York, and from a school-going child with a large clutch of siblings to a...
Performative Cultural Awareness
The Goodreads Choice awards list landed in my inbox, and who can resist a list of books? (I had only read one: The Vanishing Half) The best debut novel was a novel I had not heard of, Such a Fun...
Exercising Opinions
In We need to talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver featured a chillingly callous teenager who plans and executes a shooting at his school. Big Brother focused on an extremely obese man who is ‘eating himself to death’. So Much For...
Small Town Tensions
Set in a very small area of New Hampshire, Sue Miller’s The Arsonist features as its protagonist Frankie Rowley, a burned-out aid worker just returned from Kenya. Her parents have been summer visitors to the area for years, since Frankie...
Ahistorical craftwork
This well-intentioned novel is set in 1950s India. Independence is in the air, not just for the recently independent country, but for the protagonist Lakshmi Shastri, who escapes an early marriage and domestic violence in a village to make a...
Shattering Ceilings
First woman Vice-President. First black woman Vice-President. First Indian-American Vice-President. First daughter of immigrants to be elected Vice-President. And what a fantastic speech she gave! Calm, confident, capable, tough, conscious of her roots, a special call-out to black women, a...
L’enfant et l’affaire
~ The Margot Affair, by Sanaë Lemoine ~ It is said that the French have more relaxed sexual attitudes than the uptight Brits and Americans. Indeed, French presidents Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande have all had multiple affairs with various...
Criminal Divination
~ Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith ~ The latest Robert Galbraith is quite the tome, clocking in at an impressive 927 pages. Goody, I thought. Many evenings and weekends of reading a capable author showing off her craft, her undeniable...
Lightweight confection
~ Baking cakes in Kigali, by Gaile Parkin ~ Set squarely in Mma Ramotswe territory is Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali, featuring a plump entrepreneurial African woman who solves human problems along with the cakes she sells. There are...
Existential Coming-of-Age, with an American Multilingual Twist
Coming-of-age millenial stories must be thick on the ground these days. Without seeking them out, several have come my way in the last few months — two by Sally Rooney, one by Naoise Dolan, and now, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot,...
Pythons and Politics
Lifelong Florida resident Carl Hiassen has carved himself a unique niche in the 45-odd years he’s been writing novels. Set firmly in his home state, his novels typically feature a wild cast of environmental activists, law personnel, corrupt politicians and...
Foreign Language
Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, Exciting Times, will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Dolan and Rooney are both young female Irish authors, and both write about young female protagonists who are very self-aware, intelligent,...
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