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...
Historical fiction
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...
Colonial Singapore
~ Tanamera, by Noel Barber ~ When I first saw this title, I didn’t recognise it straightaway, being more accustomed to reading it as 2 separate words: ‘Tanah Merah” – Merah is red, and Tanah is soil, land, even territory....
Exacting rules for single women
~ A Single Thread, by Tracy Chevalier ~ Another triumph by Chevalier. This is a beautifully worked piece almost in miniature, set in Winchester in the early 1930s, against the backdrop of a country still recovering from the great war...
Race Relations Mysteries
Black Water Rising, and The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke Houston-born Attica Locke is a screenwriter and director who started writing novels in 2009. Her first two novels, Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season are in the mystery-noir genre,...
Anguished Deliberations
~ Women Talking, by Miriam Toews ~ Agency and self-determination. That’s what the Mennonite women in Miriam Toews’ powerful novel struggle towards over the course of the book, despite the patriarchy, religious, and community culture stacked against them. Mennonites are...
Love, family, nature
~ A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House ~ An Irish descendent riding up Rosebud Mountain to clear the land passes an eighteen year old Cherokee girl of such stunning looks that he cannot get her out of his mind:...
“Champor-champor” culture
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
A Turbulent World
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
The Scars of Slavery
~ Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan ~ George Washington Black is the full name of our protagonist – though he is often called Wash by friends – who was born in 1818 in Barbados, a slave, and the son of a...
Hardscrabble lives
~Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan ~ The riveting thing about this novel, for me any rate, is Julie Richards (nee Harmon)’s capacity for hard work and sheer optimism. It is hard to keep in mind she is only 17 years...
Clunky cloak-and-dagger
~ The Spies of Shilling Lane, by Jennifer Ryan ~ A spy story set in WWII England featuring a middle-aged mother sounds like the perfect novel for a Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea but, alas, The Spies of...
Gothic morals
~ Melmoth, by Sarah Perry ~ This is a difficult book to review. There is a clear plotline, there are a number of strong protagonists, but this novel’s focus is neither on the storyline nor its key characters. It has...
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