The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify...
Growing up in Karachi, Anvar was the rebellious, non-conformist kid in the family, snarkily resenting his perfect older brother Aamir. [Aamir] has gone through life checking all the right boxes that a model desi boy should check. […] Somehow he’s...
At first, the Galvins of Hidden Valley Road, Colorado, seemed to be like any other family, albeit an unusually large one — Don and Mimi Galvin had 10 boys followed by 2 girls. This was exactly what they wanted. “The...
Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn. No shortage of fodder there....
I first came across Louise Penny in the pages of the Washington Post; her ‘cosy’ mysteries have a large following. Personally, I found her Kingdom of the Blind rather disappointing. That was the 14th book in her series, though, so...
A misogynistic society with an intense focus on human reproduction? Surely the definitive such dystopian-future novel is The Handmaid’s Tale; it almost seems pointless for anyone else to try. What can another author say that Margaret Atwood has not already...
What can one fairly expect from a debut novel? On the one hand, many writers take a book or two to get their first (often semi-autobiographical) thoughts out of their system and improve their craft. So it seems only fair...
Four men spend several hours in a hotel room on a night in 1964. Not four ordinary men: these were pretty remarkable people by any standard. It is astonishing to discover that the film One Night in Miami is based...
Women are typically at the margins of war history: they send their men off with pride and sorrow, they serve as camp followers, they nurse the injured, they hold up the fort back home, and they mourn the fallen, while...
Recently the Washington Post held a poll on the best fictional detectives, and the winner was Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache. Mortified by my ignorance about this author and detective, I put the first available Penny novel, Kingdom of the Blind,...
Neither romantic love, nor love within traditional nuclear families is at the center of this novel. Set among the Indian community of Trinidad and Tobago, Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love follows the love between and around three characters whose love...
Many historians, opinion writers and regular people have speculated whether being married to Bill has helped or hurt Hillary Clinton. The opinions are mixed: some think that her years as First Lady brought her public prominence and jumpstarted her senatorial...
So confident and effortless is this novel, I had to check twice to confirm that it was indeed a debut. It is very specific to its characters and places and makes no claims to grand ideas, but still makes some...
Set in late 2016, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a friend, Marco Rosedale, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman forty years earlier. An expat Brit living in America, Marco gets a call one day from a...
Charmed as I was by Sally Andrew’s first novel, Recipes for Love and Murder, I was looking forward to her second mystery, also set in the Klein Karoo of South Africa and featuring Tannie Maria, a middle-aged widow who likes...
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