Misfits
I have liked many of Baker Kline’s novels, and I am so glad this latest is no exception. The story starts in the 1840s, in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Our protagonist, Sarah – Sallie – is a typical southern belle,...
Fiction
Character-driven stories of a feudal, modern Pakistan
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s exquisite collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published in 2009. A mere 17 years later, his first novel, This is Where the Serpent Lives, has come out. For non-authors like myself, the long gap...
Facing Mortality with Dry Humour
A pocket sized book of not quite 100 pages, this is more short story than novel. But it is classic Alan Bennett. It is extremely British, very dry in its humour, ribald at times, and poignant too. The setting is...
Coal Miner’s Son
The day Gertie blew, I watched my father leave for work like I did every morning. It was called morning by the men who worked that shift, but to me it was still night, black and cold and silent except...
Taxi Driver
It’s always good to see South Asian-American novelists branching out from the immigrant-identity theme, so I was pleased to come across Yosha Gunasekara’s The Midnight Taxi, which promised something a little different. In this debut novel, Siriwathi Perera is a...
Real Estate, Real Mess
I must confess I thought this book would be more about the property market in DC and the experience of buying a house. And to some extent, it is about the pursuit of a house, but the focus is not really on...
Grief and Survivor’s Guilt
Tara Menon’s debut novel opens with a horrifically vivid image. The narrator is at an upscale restaurant being served whole fish, when, one by one, the diners start to choke and cough, and then regurgitate pieces of a human body...
Windows into Working Women’s Lives in 1920
I may have foolishly failed to take Susan’s advice about reading Death Comes to Pemberley, but at least I had the sense to follow up on her recommendation of Women’s Hotel. From the very start, Lavery’s droll style made me...
Secrets in the Outback
The most famous novel about an Australian sheep farm is probably The Thorn Birds, a melodramatic novel about forbidden love that still had a powerful sense of place (Germaine Greer described it as ‘the best bad book I’ve ever read’,...
The infinite diasporic variations within a community
From the outset, this is clearly a very thoughtfully put together novel. The author ponders how to render her characters’ names, characters who “move within various Chinese-speaking regions of the world”, to “denote their code-switching in a way that would...
The Fruits of Inheritance
David Davidar’s House of Blue Mangoes was published in 2001 and received excellent reviews. The cynic in me wondered whether reviewers were ever likely to criticize a debut novel from an author who also happened to be the CEO of...
Lives in Transition
This is a novel about Claire and Eliot, married for decades, when Claire enters the last few weeks or months of her life, stopping cancer treatment after 8 years. At the start of the novel, Claire drops her bombshell –...
Slices of Life
Allegra Goodman’s Intuition was a delightful read. Set in a biomedical laboratory (and there are far too few books in such settings, but I might be biased), it focused on a young woman with a crush on an older postdoc...
Deathly cardboard characters
I was warned not to bother reading this book, but having recently been rereading many of P.D James’ Adam Dalglish novels, and even a Cordelia Grey novel, and having been utterly thrilled anew by James’ artistry and craftsmanship, I threw...
Honor killing?
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, an Afghan family moved to Pakistan as refugees. Years later in 1997, they migrated to Northern Virginia, arriving in the dead of winter, with no extended family to help. The small, tightly-knit Afghan...
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