When this collection came out in 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was already well known from the excellent Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, but had not yet published the wonderful Americanah. This collection, This Thing Around Your Neck,...
Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly....
A debut author with a collection of short stories set in Bangalore; definitely worth investigating. Most of the stories in Shubha Sunder’s collection, Boomtown Girl , focuses, as befits the title, on girls growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s....
The early wave of South Asian immigrant writing focused on the immigrants themselves: their unfamiliarity with the new country, discrimination, yearning for a home that changed after their departure, and excitement about the opportunities now available to them. The next...
Novels about neurodivergent people are no longer unusual. After the well-deserved success of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog In the NightTime, there have been several novels with very memorably ‘different’ characters who have to adjust to an...
The title of Allegra Goodman’s novel, and its cover, point to the nature of its content: it is about a girl called Sam. The first sentence of the novel is almost unnecessary. There is a girl, and her name is...
If Indian villages were populated by American teenagers, The Bandit Queens would be a black-humor romp. The novel is inspired by the true story of Phoolan Devi, a poor woman at the bottom of the caste structure in Uttar Pradesh....
Three unrelated people live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Each one has lost, in some way, someone close to them. These losses have in common that they are recent, and have left the character devastated, but each one is...
Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These, was a little gem, and Foster is another one. A mere 76 pages, it is wonderfully complete: saying everything in just a few words, leaving enough unsaid for the reader to draw their...
Surely The Circus Train contains the most incredibly sanitized description of the Holocaust ever. A description of two prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto includes this line the scant diet of watery soup and moldy potatoes making it nearly impossible to...
In contrast to the immigrant parents in my last review, the Indian-American parents in Circa are very, very old-school, resist any hint of assimilation, and are strict with their teenage daughter Heera. They want their daughter to wear only Indian...
North American immigrant writing tends to be dominated by the US, so it is a pleasant variation to come across a book by an Indo-Canadian author. Scaachi Koul is in her early 30s, and a writer at Buzzfeed. This, her...
It seems to be a season of historical fiction for me: the latest to cross my path is set in the early 1900s, in Colorado. At 17, Sylvie Pelletier is the oldest child of a Quebecois family, whose father Jacques...
I’d venture to guess that when most people think of San Francisco, they think of one of the following: the ’60s, with flower children and LSD; an epicenter of the gay rights revolution; or the tech era with highpriced real...
Kate Atkinson has great talent. Her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a lovely, if sometimes grim, multigenerational tale of a family in York, with a twist that is hinted at occasionally, and slowly becomes clear over...
Evolving Friendships
Tedious gangster fare
Treaties made “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”. And then abrogated.
Women at War
An interesting debut, imperfectly executed
Motherhood
“A weird boy wonderland”
Guilt, duty, ambition, sacrifice
Intersecting lives in a fluid history
Oscar Shorts
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