A seriously compelling read, one of those you can barely stand to have to put the book down to attend to life. The quality of the storytelling is what makes this novel so unput-down-able, as well as its characters whom...
A black unofficial private investigator on the mean streets of LA. Many readers will think immediately of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, but Joe Ide’s IQ deserves to stand on its own pedestal. IQ stands for Isaiah Quintana, a young man...
Mary Lawson charms the socks off me. It is very difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what makes her writing so appealing, but the attraction is there and powerful, from cover to cover, unwavering. This is, on the surface...
A Taiwanese-American coming-of-age story, set in a blended family? It could have potential. Despite the title, the protagonist is not, in fact, a Tiger Mom, but is Lexa, the result of a romance between her Caucasian-American mother and a Taiwanese...
The Fortune Men has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker, so I embarked on this reading experience with the full expectation that it would be of considerable merit – and it did not disappoint. The novel’s plotline is relatively simple,...
Spanning 300 years, 2 continents, 7 generations, and 14 different perspectives, Homegoing is an astonishing debut novel by a 26-year-old Ghanaian-American. In 1700s Ghana, two half-sisters are born. Effia the Beautiful is a well-born Fante whose mother, Maame, had vanished...
From the start, the writing voice is compelling, both being extremely assured and able to pack in huge amounts of information in a few words. Early on, we hear from one of the two protagonists that, My parents had left...
Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if...
If your tastes in books runs to family relationships and domestic drama, to the understated and the quietly poignant, this is an example of an excellent read. It is not an explosive kind of novel, everything happens very quietly, beneath...
It is a cliché that everything is bigger in Texas. In fact, so big as to be Olympian. So goes the conceit of this novel. Set in a fictional town called Olympus, halfway between Houston and Austin, in a sprawling...
This is a book which sets out to amuse and entertain. And to some extent, it does this well enough, offering a frothy, light read that carefully avoids straying into the frivolous or the trite. It is a whodunnit, but...
Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped...
As befits a philosophy graduate from Columbia, the novel opens with a contemplation of the notion of time and its elusive nature, before introducing us to Krishan and his home life in Colombo with his mother and aging grandmother. ...
“Noriko, promise me that you will obey in all things. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are...
Having reading reviews of how harrowing Gyasi’s Homegoing was, I have still not summoned the courage to read it yet, but her second novel has turned out very readable. Our protagonist is Gifty, a second generation Ghanaian immigrant in the...
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