Irreverent and honest
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...
Susan
Bible Belt Autofiction
Autofiction is the in thing these days: a fictionalized version of the author’s own life experiences turned into a novel. In the last couple of years, I’ve read Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, and Elif Batuman, and there are many others...
Marble and Misery
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...
Jazz City by the Bay
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...
The Roaring ’20s
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...
Shipboard noir
The Batavia sails! From a distance, a queenly glide; on board, the frantic effort of all hands. Roars and curses and trumpeted orders. The new ship must be learned and felt. A week at sea and ship and crew will...
A few decades of Nigerian life
Four girls grow up in Nigeria and then scatter across the world. In this series of connected short stories, debut author Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi traces their lives, with an occasional foray into the life of a relative or related character....
Inauthentic voices
To call Alexander McCall Smith prolific is an understatement. The first No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel was published in 1998, and in the last 23 years, there have been 23 novels in the series. There have also been 15...
The woods were lovely, dark and deep
Finland has a population of 5 million today, and the Finnish-American population is about half a million. The Scandinavian-American community is dominated by the 3.5 million of Swedish origin. Given these numbers, it is not surprising that most people know...
To undrown, to cry until you don’t need to cry no more
Lulu did something for me that not even my sister Angela would do. When Angela saw me cry, my sister said, You’re drowning in a glass of water. I tell you, Angela is cold. But cold! Pfft! She has no...
Slide Rules against Ballistic Missiles
There’s no shortage of authors who write popular historical-fiction novels. What makes Robert Harris distinctive among them is the solid research that goes into his novels, and the accurate, detailed descriptions that leave the reader more knowledgeable than before. Some...
Predictable foodie rom-com
As the sweet aromas of freshly-baked bread awaken memories of her apprenticeship at a French boulangerie, she feels the desire and ambition to bake bread once again. Bread, in this novel, is a metaphor for life, healing and finding oneself....
Divinity or deception?
In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no...
“If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your ass.”
MI-6, home of James Bond and George Smiley, is legendary. MI-5, its less famous cousin, deals with domestic intelligence in the UK. It has generally not been featured in novels, perhaps because stalking terrorism on the streets of Brixton seems...
In the minimum-wage weeds
In the late 90s, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a low-wage worker. She wanted to examine, first-hand, the rhetoric surrounding Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which pushed welfare recipients into minimum-wage jobs on the theory that any job...
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