Corie Adjmi’s novel is set in the Syrian Jewish community of America. Many readers (including myself) will not be familiar with this community, or perhaps even be aware that they exist, but there are close to a million Syrian Jews...
In the upscale East Hamptons of Long Island, a young man is at a party, snorts some coke, and then gets arrested for possession. This being his first offense, he eventually is required to attend addiction classes. The title gives...
Two rivers and two countries are tied together in this novel by Shobha Rao, reflecting the duality of meaning in its title, Indian Country. One is India, of course, a country full of Indians. The other is the Native American...
Richard Osman started off as a TV host, but is best known outside the UK for his series of detective novels. The detectives in these books, The Thursday Murder Club series, are not your usual tormented private eyes or Detective...
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. This memorable sentence is the start of Arundhati Roy’s wonderful The God of Small Things, and anyone who has read it knows or has assumed the novel contains the broad outlines of...
In Taft, Ann Patchett’s protagonist is about as different from herself as you can imagine. John Nickel is a middle-aged black male former blues drummer who now runs a bar. Then A girl walked into the bar. This teenager, Fay...
A small beach town in Cape Cod. A family who has rented the same house there for decades, year after year. The middle-aged parents, daughter, son and son’s girlfriend all get along pretty well. These are the apparently peaceful circumstances...
I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my father Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of...
In 1997 Seattle, a young Indian-American woman called Amina Eapen receives a call from her mother Kamala in Albuquerque. Her neurosurgeon father Thomas, it seems, has started talking to himself, and worse, to his long-dead family members. A little guilt-tripping...
Few detectives are as unusual as those in this novel. They work as a team but their leader is most definitely the black sheep of the group. To be precise, a black Hebridean four-horned ram called Othello. The flock of...
Many of us have had the experience of surgery in a hospital, either for ourselves or people around us. The routine may be familiar if fraught: nurses briskly entering and leaving, vital signs checked at apparently random intervals, those bright...
It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her wonderful novel Americanah. In the meantime she has not been idle: she has written two books on feminism and one on grief, a collection of short stories, and a children’s...
Hundreds of novels are set in New York, San Francisco, LA and so on, but how many novels are set in Baltimore? It might seem too matter-of-fact a city to inspire literary creations, but in fact one of America’s best...
Historical fiction is not easy to write, I should think. It demands extensive research to be convincing, but at the same time the research needs to be painted in gently, filling the background, with the story in the foreground, and...
Sarah Waters’ Gothic Fingersmith is set in Victorian England, and she does not spare the reader from the realities of the period. Beyond the wall lay Mr Ibbs’ sister, who was kept to her bed; she often woke ith the...
The Scars of Slavery
“If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your ass.”
Disconcerting Social Satire
Important theme, but unconvincing harvest
Upstairs, Downstairs in the White House
A Life in 143 pages
Mothers and Daughters, tensions and connections
Simplistic treatment of intolerance
Vivid flights
Good Omens in our future
Recent Comments