It is a truth universally acknowledged that few authors can resist the allure of Jane Austen’s deceptively simple plots. Many retellings of her books have emerged over the years, but (spoiler alert!) few of them come close to the wit,...
~ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser ~ Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs. Many...
~ The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling ~ Motherhood is tough when money is tight, when the parent is effectively single and has little family support. Yet, as most mothers know, there are private pleasures in a baby’s unique, special...
~ Beartown/Us Against You, by Fredrik Backman ~ Beartown is a heartbreaking novel about cruelty and sports. The eponymous town in this powerful novel by Fredrik Backman is a remote backwoods place with one focus: its ice hockey team. Boys...
The (first) No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is probably one of the most charming detective novels ever. Set in Botswana, it featured Precious Ramotswe, 34 years old, with a small inheritance and no detective experience, but plenty of common sense....
Can there be anything more to say about Indian weddings? Hindi films have ended with happy, ornate weddings forever, and there are dozens of films which are entirely about weddings. A gazillion books have covered “arranged” and “love” marriages in...
Young parents who separated soon after her birth, a father who denied paternity and only paid child support under duress, and a mother who was barely scraping by would add a whole new level of complexity to anyone’s coming-of-age memoir....
~ A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne ~ Maurice Swift is an ambitious novelist with a unfortunate limitation: he is good with words, but has no ideas for plots. He is extraordinarily handsome, though, and both men and...
~ Winter’s Bone ~ Book and Movie ~ Daniel Woodrell’s slim, bleakly powerful novel Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks, in a house where the road “has got rough to where you about can’t call it a road no...
My mother has exactly the same breakfast every day. One boiled egg (for protein), 3 olives (for sodium and good fat), and a piece of ham (also protein), with toast on the side. Last fall while she was recovering from...
Good Omens is now a TV series! What a crazy, delightful book! I won’t even attempt to summarize it. Suffice it to say that it involves the Apocalypse, an angel called Aziraphale and a demon called Crowley who are the...
Last year we got a new Tana French and a new Robert Galbraith, both of which I had been waiting for impatiently. (If only all my favourite mystery authors would come out with one solidly satisfying book a year). This...
~ Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains. By Helen Thomson ~ In 1985, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a marvellous book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He describes some of the more unusual cases...
~ Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ The first thing to note is that the Punjabi widows of the title live in London, perhaps not one’s first guess at a location for women living heavily circumscribed...
~ Bel Canto ~ the book and film ~ If only Ang Lee had directed the film of Bel Canto. The exquisite novel by Ann Patchett is widely thought to be her best. It is approximately based on the 1996...
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