In a way, it feels unnecessary to review this novella, because Colm Toibin’s Foreword already did such a good job of reviewing it, very comprehensively and in the most complimentary of terms. The novel’s protagonist is Bombayite Sandeep, 10 years...
The largest concentration of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States is found in and around Washington DC, and that’s where this novel is set. The protagonist, Mamush (a fond family nickname) is Ethiopian-American, born and raised in the US, but...
The son in question here is an only child, both of his parents and of his surrogate mum. Seth is a baby whom New York-based Talissa carries and delivers for London couple, Alaric and Mary. Mary chooses the name Seth,...
Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of her readers must have been like me: a thousand miles away from the restaurants she reviewed, and far below the...
From the very outset, this book made me smile. It is humorously written, and it is clear the author is the type who likes to surprise her reader, usually by extending information in an unusual way. For example, when telling...
Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only comparatively few bridges to get you from one maze to another....
There have been many novels written about children who are abducted, who have gone missing, who are held captive say in a school building, and all of these are suspenseful, particularly so probably because young children are involved. Fierce Kingdom by...
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...
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...
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...
Forgettable Asian-Americans
Overdone Swedish Satire
Identity, Choices and Friendship
Unsurprising mysteries: the past of a rich celebrity
Nuances of class, respectability and affluence
No Place Like
Byways of upper-crust Pakistan
Class and suffrage in Victorian England
Top-notch déjà vu
After the war, soldiering on for freedom and a livelihood
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