Three Women
Having enjoyed Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, I was happy enough to pick up her next, The Confession, when I saw it. However, maybe it was my enjoyment of the period she invoked in The Miniaturist – 1680s Amsterdam...
Fiction
The sensation-laden internal life of a young teen
I honestly had no idea what to expect from this book having never heard of Megan Abbott, but the front cover had a blub from Kate Atkinson, ‘Deft, intelligent and enthralling’, so I thought well now, if such an accomplished...
Flat and predictable
The Silent Patient screams ‘unreliable narrator’ from just about the first chapter. Alicia Berensen, a beautiful and talented artist, was found one night with a dead husband, a gun with her fingerprints, and slashed wrists. She survived, but has not...
Class and suffrage in Victorian England
This is one of Chevalier’s earlier novels – her third actually, after Girl with the Pearl Earring and Virgin Blue – and for some good reason I can no longer recall, I began to read it but didn’t get far...
Feeling like an American
I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway. Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s...
Another novel where the ‘locals’ serve as background colour
It was more than 10 years ago when I read a few Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Restoration, Letter to Sister Benedicta), so when I came across this Islands of Mercy published in 2020, and saw from the blurb...
An uncommonly multicultural family with common problems
At its outset, Dava Shastri’s Last Day seems pleasantly nonconformist. The eponymous central figure is a self-made billionaire. Despite having been brought up in the US as an Indian-American, she does not suffer from ethnic existential angst. She marries a...
Deceptively simple and beautifully rendered
This most recent of Ishiguro’s novels contains a futuristic take on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our domestic/personal lives. Klara is an AF – Artificial Friend – a sort of human-like robot who is intelligent and even unique, but nevertheless a...
Simplistic treatment of intolerance
Thrity Umrigar wrote a nuanced and sensitive exploration of the Indian employer-servant relationship in The Space Between Us, but sad to say, her latest novel Honor displays little of that nuance or sensitivity. There are two women at the center...
Sexuality and judgement
Having been impressed by A Parchment of Leaves, I was keen to try another Silas House novel, and when I got back to DC, I found several in the Martin Luther King Jr Library. Southernmost begins with a flood in...
A Wimsey century, cricket and all
At times of tension one returns to the old, familiar, and comforting, and so it was that I spent the early part of 2022 re-reading Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers. Sayers was born in 1897, and her first detective novel...
Family secrets, enduring bonds
Set largely in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and following a protagonist through some formative years, The Paper Palace is far from an idyllic coming-of-age tale. The title is the affectionate nickname for a beat-up old house in the Cape woods, where...
Enchanting layers upon interlinked layers
I start this review with an apology to the reader; I hardly know how to begin to review such a book. An apology is needed all the more because this is such a remarkable book that I couldn’t hope for...
Posthumous spying
It is such a pleasure to be in the hands of a master craftsman, and John Le Carré is one indeed. Sure, a few of his novels from the past decade or two have been less exciting, perhaps even pedestrian,...
Self-awareness and angst
Ava is a young Irish woman who manages to get out of Ireland by taking up teaching English to children in Hong Kong. She has no vacation for teaching and very little interest in Hong Kong, but manages to be...
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