Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. I’d read only two of her books, The Round House and LaRose, and both were gorgeous, deeply emotional without being sentimental, suffused with the spirit and environment of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Native Americans...
The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant...
It is hard not to be charmed from the outset at the telling of the story by a precocious 13 year old, who is super protective of her 10 year old sister, Peppa, and seemingly super savvy about outdoor survival...
This biography was published in 2019, so this book is the story of Harris’ childhood and career till then: as district attorney for San Francisco, then as California’s attorney general, before becoming California’s US Senator. One reads keeping in mind...
He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History of Burning, made me stop reading. I thought how ‘traditional’ my family’s immigrant...
This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. Shivani’s Amader Shantiniketan is one of those books where the foreword is almost as interesting as the book itself. This is not surprising, since the foreword is...
It has been quite awhile since I read a Pat Barker novel, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to get back to her writing, because it is consistently strong and subtle. Toby’s Room is no exception. Our...
A new Kate Atkinson novel! And that too, featuring the inimitable Jackson Brodie, who I feared had retired forever at the end of Big Sky! The opening of Atkinson’s latest, Death at the Sign of a Rook, was a bit...
Set in the 1820 or 1830s, in the Black Country (West Midlands of the UK, previously a coal mining region) this book is about ‘the noble art’ of fisticuffs, or pugilism, or as we know it today, boxing. Most unusually,...
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
In the introduction, Lynne Truss calls this novel a masterpiece, and so it is. Truss however does not agree with common opinion that it is necessarily a parody of Mary Webb’s rural novels which were popular in the 1920s and...
Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative. Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. […] By the time they grew to be adults, many were...
It is with great pleasure I now know of yet another wonderful writer and storyteller, Nathan Hill. This is the first book of his that I have come across (Wellness is Hill’s 2nd novel), and after this, I fully intend to read...
“It is solved by walking” — attributed to St Augustine, circa 400 AD Rachel Joyce’s first novel is one of those quintessentially British, slightly quaint, gentle, a tad sentimental, but still charming stories. It is described as being about ‘an...
The title of this book is singularly apt. Choice is not a novel, rather it is 3 long, short-stories, 2 set in London and 1 in Bangladesh, which all show individuals making choices, and the constrains and consequences of those choices....
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