On the Cusp of Change
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...
Susan
Women at War
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...
Wintry Mix
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,...
Come for a love-up
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...
Remaking History
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...
Self-absorption against a violent, lovely background
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...
He Said, She Said
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...
More beskuit, but less satisfying
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...
Trouble with Words
Imbued in gangster-noir ambiance from the start, one expects Prohibition-era shootouts, hardboiled men of action, and gorgeously cynical cigarette-smoking women from Motherless Brooklyn. Indeed, the opening chapter is classic: We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth street, a...
Slices of history
Remember back when Bollywood made silent films? (If you’re reading this, probably not.) For those who do remember the pre-Independence Hindi film era, the names Sulochana, Miss Rose, Pramila and Nadira might ring bells, but even they might be surprised...
The Bracelet
I feel drained at the end of an Elena Ferrante novel. Her precisely detailed representations of the inner emotions are riveting and incredibly powerful, but also feel a little bit like watching a medical dissection. Every thought, whether charmingly appealing...
Irish Island Potboiler
An island several miles off the mainland. A group of people who are invited there for an event. The weather gets worse. A body (or more?) is found, and several people have a long history (and therefore a strong motive)...
Spokane, 1909: Cauldron of unrest and inequality
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins had a delightfully unexpected plot: it featured Richard Burton, the filming of Cleopatra in Italy in 1963, the 2010s in Hollywood and reality TV, a proposed screenplay about the Donner Party , and the Pacific Northwest...
Affectionate Chaos
There’s a lot going on in Strangers and Cousins. There are family dynamics: Bennie and Walter, parents of four children ranging in age from 5 to 22, are preparing for the wedding of their oldest, Clem(entine), who is marrying her...
Pandemic
A more topical novel can hardly be imagined, but it is actually mere coincidence that Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set during the 1918 (“Spanish Flu”) influenza pandemic. She started writing it in October 2018, “inspired by the centenary of...
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