An entertaining film was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, raised from complete lightweight status by the quality of the acting. It turns out to have been based on a book which recently came my way at the library. Deborah Moggach’s...
To situate a novel partly in 1960s Italy with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and partly in 2000s Hollywood is surely a unique approach. This novel goes quite a bit further in both location and time. Beautiful Ruins opens in...
A black unofficial private investigator on the mean streets of LA. Many readers will think immediately of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, but Joe Ide’s IQ deserves to stand on its own pedestal. IQ stands for Isaiah Quintana, a young man...
A Taiwanese-American coming-of-age story, set in a blended family? It could have potential. Despite the title, the protagonist is not, in fact, a Tiger Mom, but is Lexa, the result of a romance between her Caucasian-American mother and a Taiwanese...
Spanning 300 years, 2 continents, 7 generations, and 14 different perspectives, Homegoing is an astonishing debut novel by a 26-year-old Ghanaian-American. In 1700s Ghana, two half-sisters are born. Effia the Beautiful is a well-born Fante whose mother, Maame, had vanished...
Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if...
It is a cliché that everything is bigger in Texas. In fact, so big as to be Olympian. So goes the conceit of this novel. Set in a fictional town called Olympus, halfway between Houston and Austin, in a sprawling...
Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped...
“Noriko, promise me that you will obey in all things. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are...
Here is a list of things Majella, the twenty-something year old Big Girl at the center of this novel, likes: Eating Dallas (except for the 1985-6 season, also known as Bobby’s Dream) UK Gold [this TV channel?] Her da Her...
In the 1900s, authors like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour rode the peak of the ‘Western’ genre with their enormous output. These books typically featured tough, sharp-shooting, quick-on-the-draw white men with beautiful horses who rode the wild country of the...
There’s a recent spate of American novels which expose the toxic reality of apparently exciting jobs. The Nanny Diaries featured a young white woman working as a nanny for wealthy New Yorkers, and revealed that the employers were jealous, self-centered,...
It is no secret that the Indian-American middle class community is ambitious and competitive. Immigrants with professional backgrounds and advanced degrees who arrive in a new country typically push their children to even higher achievements. Many novels have described the...
In apartheid South Africa, the ruling white party created Bantustans, or ‘black homelands’, with the goal of migrating the entire black population out of their own homeland into these barren areas according to their assigned tribal definition. The Zulus would...
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beloved American classic. Its story of an Irish-American girl growing up in poverty in 1900s Brooklyn has charmed readers for over 80 years. Tomorrow will be better is one of Smith’s...
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