Parable of a nation
Damon Galgut’s novel reflects the slow and partial fulfillment of the promise of the country it is set in: South Africa. It is a memorable read, the kind that stays with you for weeks afterwards, the kind where a passage...
Susan
A span of black American history
Heads-up: this novel has a daunting cast of characters. In their favour, they are interestingly diverse: they live over multiple decades in two continents, they are black, white, married, single, straight, gay, male, female, and of various ages. Some are...
The push and pull of motherhood
Emily Itami’s protagonist, Mizuki, is a fulltime housewife in Tokyo with an exhausted salaryman husband and two children. On the surface, her life looks fine, but she is miserable. I wanted this life, wanted my children. I guess that, like...
Catalan hallucination
Barcelona in the early 2000s is the backdrop for this set of 3 loosely linked novellas. This is not the Barcelona of tourists — Las Ramblas, the bars, the seashore and Gaudi. Rupert Thomson’s stories touch on immigration, racism, migrants,...
The best Marigold Hotel is definitely the film
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...
“The sweet lovely mess that is real life”
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...
East LA Investigations
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...
Forgettable Asian-Americans
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...
Separated sisters “are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of a pond”
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...
Cultural appropriation?
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...
Gods on Earth
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...
Multi-threaded Roman fabric
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...
Juvenile writing
“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...
Fish and chips and a slice of life
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...
A less mythical frontier story
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...
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