Driss Guerraoui dies in a hit-and-run accident in a small California Mojave town. Driss is a Moroccan immigrant, so there are inevitable threads of racism running through his backstory and the investigation of his death, and through the reactions of...
Richard Russo’s trilogy of books set in North Bath, upstate New York, follows the familiar themes of many of his novels: absent fathers, resentful sons, and resulting trauma that continues from generation to generation. His Empire Falls was set in...
The Dog of the North caught my eye entirely because of its title. Was this a Jack London-ish adventure novel in the Yukon? Or was this slang for something entirely different? In fact, the title turns out to be the...
A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot. Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s...
Barbara Kingsolver is the well-deserved recipient of many literary prizes. Her more recent novels have been impressive stand-alones, but I’m among the many readers who also love and re-read her original trilogy set in Arizona. The Bean Trees and Pigs...
It is always a pleasure to open a book by an accomplished, confident author, and Zadie Smith is one of those. Her first novel White Teeth was a rollicking tale about a Bangladeshi immigrant and his English friend, and her...
Frank McCourt had been telling his stories for decades in New York bars before he wrote his first book. I imagine that his audience always egged him on, because McCourt is a natural raconteur. Born in America and brought up...
Historical fiction can be tricky. On the one hand, the author needs to aim for historical accuracy, including the less appealing social and cultural aspects of the time. On the other hand, the author might not want to associate himself...
That quintessentially American icon, the suburban shopping mall, is at the center of this quiet and pleasing debut novel. This particular mall, in a small town in Pennsylvania, is dying, and only a few shops are still open, with the...
Among the flurry of novels set in Nigeria of late is The Nigerwife. It stands out because the author is neither Nigerian nor Caucasian, but is a Black English writer, Vanessa Walter. Based on her own experience living in Lagos,...
The myth of the model minority has bedeviled Asian-Americans for decades: they are supposed to be the high achievers who bootstrapped themselves through American society, and are held up as role models for other immigrant groups. Prachi Gupta’s family seemed...
This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. A memoir with a conspicuously literary slant is Buddhadeva Bose’s The Land Where I Found it All. Translated from Bengali to English by Nandini Gupta, the translator...
Let me tell you about dark men with white smiles, these Tamil men I loved and who belonged with me. In my house there were four of them. Each of my brothers resembled my father in a different way. All...
Set as it is in an upscale American suburb and focusing on the few nonwhite residents, this first novel may remind readers of Celeste Ng’s Little Flowers Everywhere, but to my mind, Vibhuti Jain’s Our Best Intentions tackles a complex...
Amy Chua burst into popular public consciousness with her third book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. An memoir about her strict Chinese-parenting approach, the book was both wildly entertaining and wildly controversial. Her next book also created controversy:...
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