Elizabeth Harris’ first novel has an unusual pair of main characters: a long-married gay married couple in New Jersey, one of whom has drifted politically rightwards over the years and now decides to run for Congress as a Republican. His...
Into the mundanity and trudge of Sam’s and Elena’s lives comes a bear. Sam and Elena live in San Juan with this ailing mother in a increasingly dilapidated house. Since Sam was 16 and Elena 18, they have been taking...
Anyone who loves the Great British BakeOff will be tempted by this novel, set around a baking show with amateur contestants in a large tent. In this novel the baking show is set in America, but it is as English...
I am coming to this book a quarter of a century after it won the Booker Prize in 1999. Heaven knows how many years this relatively slim volume has been in my boxes, carried around from house move to house...
Inter-culture marriages and the conflicts therein are solid fodder for novels, and many authors have explored their literary potential: Celeste Ng, Laila Lalami, Chimamanda Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi just for starters. In Rental House, Weike Wang...
Having enjoyed watching the gymnasts at the Paris Olympics 2024, I marvelled at their skill and also at their ability to take all the pressure. But I lacked the imagination to think of the parents of these young people, and...
In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and...
I was surprised to see emblazoned across the front cover, ‘The Uncensored Original Edition’, which has apparently been lost for over 80 years (the copy I had is published by Sharp Press in 2003); the original was first published in...
There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun,...
I was expecting a book of some originality just from my initial browse, and I was not disappointed. This is an unusual read, beautifully crafted, which makes land and landscape the key protagonist. Our human protagonist is Lamentations Callat, sometimes...
Every parent’s worst nightmare: a missing child. In Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You, the reader is not kept in suspense about what happened to 16-year-old Lydia, who lives with her family in a peaceful small Ohio college...
The best thing about this novel, is that it a migration-Vietnamese American diaspora story, without being too overtly so. The focus of the story is more character driven, than migration or cultural differences or migrant angst/mistreatment driven. The chapters are...
In Edison, our hero Prem is challenged to explain “What is good about Hindi movies?” It’s not something he has thought about – to a devotee, they just are. Pondering the question, he comes up with They crammed it all...
In a way, it feels unnecessary to review this novella, because Colm Toibin’s Foreword already did such a good job of reviewing it, very comprehensively and in the most complimentary of terms. The novel’s protagonist is Bombayite Sandeep, 10 years...
The largest concentration of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States is found in and around Washington DC, and that’s where this novel is set. The protagonist, Mamush (a fond family nickname) is Ethiopian-American, born and raised in the US, but...
Breaking challah with Hasidim and Mitnagdim
Separated sisters “are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of a pond”
Outsidership, through the prism of friendship
The Immigrant Generational Divide
Lovable characters described by a born storyteller
Exacting rules for single women
Grace and Courage
A Year in the Lives … at an American mall
Lovely, lively characters
Outsiders in America
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