Inauthentic voices
To call Alexander McCall Smith prolific is an understatement. The first No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel was published in 1998, and in the last 23 years, there have been 23 novels in the series. There have also been 15...
Fiction
Color Changes
Picking this new release up at the Martin Luther King Jr Library in DC, I was a little surprised by how small and slim this volume looked. Not only does this novel only have 180 pages – making it relatively...
The woods were lovely, dark and deep
Finland has a population of 5 million today, and the Finnish-American population is about half a million. The Scandinavian-American community is dominated by the 3.5 million of Swedish origin. Given these numbers, it is not surprising that most people know...
Enchanting Irish novella
From the start, this novella was so enchanting that I only dreaded how small and slim it was, meaning the read would not last very long at all. I do not hesitate to say already from the first chapter, I...
To undrown, to cry until you don’t need to cry no more
Lulu did something for me that not even my sister Angela would do. When Angela saw me cry, my sister said, You’re drowning in a glass of water. I tell you, Angela is cold. But cold! Pfft! She has no...
Provocative, amusing, magic realism
In all fairness to the author, I should start this review with a weaselly disclaimer of sorts: that I do not think this review will do justice to the novel or author, because I don’t fully grasp the genre, nor...
Three generations of Filipino-Americans
This is a refreshingly original and very in depth, detailed look into the diasporic Filipino community in the USA. Castillo conveys a large amount of not just cultural practises and norms, but the different values and codes of conduct and...
Slide Rules against Ballistic Missiles
There’s no shortage of authors who write popular historical-fiction novels. What makes Robert Harris distinctive among them is the solid research that goes into his novels, and the accurate, detailed descriptions that leave the reader more knowledgeable than before. Some...
Predictable foodie rom-com
As the sweet aromas of freshly-baked bread awaken memories of her apprenticeship at a French boulangerie, she feels the desire and ambition to bake bread once again. Bread, in this novel, is a metaphor for life, healing and finding oneself....
Tech Incubators, Religious algorithms
Having read Tahmina Anam’s previous three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, Bones of Grace, sometimes known as the Bengal Trilogy), I was surprised (but not unpleasantly) by this one. Anam’s work in the past had been characterised by...
Divinity or deception?
In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no...
Tales of short-term, commitment-free jobs
Although this is a novel translated from Japanese into English, the writing is of such good quality that it makes very good reading, even if perhaps not the same reading experience as in its original language. Nevertheless, it imparts a...
“If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your ass.”
MI-6, home of James Bond and George Smiley, is legendary. MI-5, its less famous cousin, deals with domestic intelligence in the UK. It has generally not been featured in novels, perhaps because stalking terrorism on the streets of Brixton seems...
Partition, off-key
There have been many great Partition novels, but alas, this one will not be joining those ranks. I was so pleased to see another Partition novel when I first spotted this one, and the blurb about the author looked very...
Bypassing childhood
This novel is written in the best traditions of the reliable narrator, and this first person narrator is very very reliable indeed. Although we meet Anne Marie Grosholtz when she is but a child of six, her tone is already...
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