The Iliad: as retold by women
~ The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker. ~ It must have been more than 20 years ago when Pat Barker kindly granted me an interview in my MA research. I was then studying her earlier novels in juxtapositon...
Historical fiction
The unusually talented Mr Swift
~ A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne ~ Maurice Swift is an ambitious novelist with a unfortunate limitation: he is good with words, but has no ideas for plots. He is extraordinarily handsome, though, and both men and...
Intersecting lives in a fluid history
~ A God in Every Stone, by Kamila Shamsie ~ For those of us who are avid Shamsie-readers, this sixth novel is an eagerly awaited one. Kamila Shamsie’s first four novels (In the City By the Sea, Salt and Saffron,...
A beguiling 19th-century botanist
~ The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert ~ Eat Pray Love, and its sequel, Committed, made Elizabeth Gilbert a celebrated author. Those were pleasant enough reads: warm and sincere, if a trifle too gushing; lively and entertaining, if...
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