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...
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...
I said these kinds of things were adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published 1884 So says Huck Finn during the raft journey down the Mississippi in a book that is...
A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway were both lovely pieces of historical fiction. They have...
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is Helen Simonson’s third novel. Her debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live...
A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot. Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s...
Growing up in Oxford in the 1880s, Esme is a happy little girl although she has lost her mother young, because she is loved and looked after by her father and other kind friends. Her father’s work is assisting in...
It is always a pleasure to open a book by an accomplished, confident author, and Zadie Smith is one of those. Her first novel White Teeth was a rollicking tale about a Bangladeshi immigrant and his English friend, and her...
There are many books written about the relationship between white mistresses and black slaves, and this too is one such, but there is an added angle with the book addressing both racism and sexism almost equally – that the white...
This is a novel which is as comforting to read as having a mug of hot tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit on a rainy day. In an age where so many novels are edgy, disquieting, challenging, clever, deliberately discomfiting,...
Historical fiction can be tricky. On the one hand, the author needs to aim for historical accuracy, including the less appealing social and cultural aspects of the time. On the other hand, the author might not want to associate himself...
Amusingly, Kuang feels the need to begin this 540+ page novel with an author’s note on her representation of Oxford university. Accurately, she says, The trouble with writing an Oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford...
I have read a couple of other Erdrich novels, and so far, this one was the most accessible to me. Not that any of the others were less well written, but this one made access easiest for the non-initiated American...
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