Women at War
Women are typically at the margins of war history: they send their men off with pride and sorrow, they serve as camp followers, they nurse the injured, they hold up the fort back home, and they mourn the fallen, while...
Historical fiction
Remaking History
Many historians, opinion writers and regular people have speculated whether being married to Bill has helped or hurt Hillary Clinton. The opinions are mixed: some think that her years as First Lady brought her public prominence and jumpstarted her senatorial...
Lovely Literary Layers
If ever a reader was seeking a book built on an excellent cast of characters, this will fit the bill beautifully! It is a book by a consummate storyteller, about a storyteller, and in an entirely unobtrusive but quietly pleasing...
Spokane, 1909: Cauldron of unrest and inequality
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins had a delightfully unexpected plot: it featured Richard Burton, the filming of Cleopatra in Italy in 1963, the 2010s in Hollywood and reality TV, a proposed screenplay about the Donner Party , and the Pacific Northwest...
Shellshock
It seems to have taken me four decades of reading, to come on a startling realisation midway through this novel, exactly why I so value the imaginative, innovative, skillfully crafted writing styles when reading novels, above the pedestrian and prosaic...
Pandemic
A more topical novel can hardly be imagined, but it is actually mere coincidence that Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set during the 1918 (“Spanish Flu”) influenza pandemic. She started writing it in October 2018, “inspired by the centenary of...
A Life in 143 pages
In spare, evocative prose, Mary Costello traces the life of her protagonist, Tess Lohan, from her childhood in Ireland through decades of her life in New York, and from a school-going child with a large clutch of siblings to a...
Ahistorical craftwork
This well-intentioned novel is set in 1950s India. Independence is in the air, not just for the recently independent country, but for the protagonist Lakshmi Shastri, who escapes an early marriage and domestic violence in a village to make a...
Passion
~ Fortune Rocks, by Anita Shreve ~ This is one of Shreve’s older novels and I confess I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. It is also about double the length of most of her...
Delicate passion, enduring stoicism
~ Snow on Falling Cedars. By David Guterson ~ It is surprising just how difficult it can be to review a book that one has liked immensely. The plot of this novel revolves around a trial in 1954 of Kabuo...
A richly satisfying re-read
~ A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth ~ It’s been almost three decades since I, and the world, read and loved this novel. Most beloved books get re-read from time to time, but the sheer size (literally. 4.2 lbs on...
Living Color
~ The Vanishing Half. By Brit Bennett ~ This year, especially, the profound overt and subtle effects of race on life in America have exploded into broad daylight. If it were possible, how many people would choose to be a...
Curiously familiar colonial expats
~ Woman of Cairo, by Noel Barber ~ [This review would make better sense if the reader first read my review of Noel Barber’s Tanamera] Despite being set in Cairo – where Tanamera was set in Singapore – both novels...
Alienation, at home and abroad
~ Signs for Lost Children, by Sarah Moss ~ This is 1880, Falmouth, Cornwall, where two rather extraordinary people for their age and time live, Tom and Ally (Alethea). They are extraordinary people in their own right, and an extraordinary...
1.5 millions tons per second
~ Pompeii, by Robert Harris ~ To most of us, the title of this book has only one meaning: the city near Naples that was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Indeed, that is the event at...
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