Quiet delight
Since I have devotedly followed the entire No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and mildly enjoyed a handful of other McCall Smith novels too, I was delighted to find he has placed this new one in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon),...
Fiction
The Best and the Worst in People
The Irish Magdalene laundries are now infamous: they were run to house unmarried pregnant (‘fallen’) women, who laboured in unpaid servitude for years or decades. Their babies were taken away from them and adopted out. The women were indefinitely incarcerated,...
Class, Race and Motherhood
It is a book which seems deceptively low-key and insignificant because of the very self-absorbed person the protagonist is, who wants to only live in her own little, self-circumscribed world, but which is actually told quite well, and is very...
Words of life and death
This is my first acquaintance with Sigrid Nunez’s writing and I am left hoping I will have many other opportunities to further my acquaintance with more. Nunez’s style is a smooth stream of consciousness, an intelligent, introspective, painfully honest stream...
Irish Investigations
April in Spain refers to the month as well as a person. It’s not a particularly clever pun, and to me, this was reflective of the novel as well. Is it a mystery? Not a very successful one, as the...
Sloppy and cloying
I admit it is not unusual for me to select a book because it is written by a South Asian writer. Munaweera is one such, an American-Sri Lankan (who had also lived in Nigeria), before settling on Oakland, California. What...
Ghanaian voice and flavour
When I first began reading this book, it was surprisingly uphill going, but only just for a few pages/chapters until one accustoms oneself to the writing style and dialogue in Ghanaian-inflected English, which is rather charming: You mean what? Miss...
Grueling and gorgeous
Ballet is a notoriously brutal profession. From early childhood through their teens, dancers must train and practice relentlessly, until they make it to a professional dance company with the hope of eventually attaining principal dancer status. An injury can derail...
Of a certain age
The idea behind this plotline is quite intriguing: a 70 year old woman left by her husband and feeling depressed, spots a black dress in a charity shop, Scoop neck, clingy. It spoke of cigarettes and Martinis […] snug but...
Parable of a nation
Damon Galgut’s novel reflects the slow and partial fulfillment of the promise of the country it is set in: South Africa. It is a memorable read, the kind that stays with you for weeks afterwards, the kind where a passage...
Officers and convicts
Having enjoyed The Lieutenant, I was looking forward to another Kate Grenville novel. A Room Made of Leaves is the account Elizabeth MacArthur nee Veale writes 12 years after her husband’s death, contradicting the narrative he had spun. John MacArthur...
A span of black American history
Heads-up: this novel has a daunting cast of characters. In their favour, they are interestingly diverse: they live over multiple decades in two continents, they are black, white, married, single, straight, gay, male, female, and of various ages. Some are...
An interesting debut, imperfectly executed
We first encounter our protagonist, Hayat, a 2nd generation Pakistani American lad, in college, but very quickly, the narrative goes back to a time when Hayat was 10 years old. He lives with Muneer his mum, and Naveed, his dad,...
The push and pull of motherhood
Emily Itami’s protagonist, Mizuki, is a fulltime housewife in Tokyo with an exhausted salaryman husband and two children. On the surface, her life looks fine, but she is miserable. I wanted this life, wanted my children. I guess that, like...
Husband pic’n’mix
This third novel of Sahota’s is mostly set in rural Punjab, in 1929; whereas his first two novels were British-based for most part. However, there is a parallel storyline happening in 1999, of a British Asian 18 year old who...
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