All The Single Ladies
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,...
Fiction
In the Darkling Wood
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...
What’s it like, being different? “People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.”
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...
A pleasant immigrant story
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...
The Indian immigrant experience – Bollywood esh-tyle!
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...
A bubble poised perfectly for a fleeting moment
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...
A donut with a hole where something solid should be
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...
Homo neanderthalis, homo sapiens, and human consciousness
The son in question here is an only child, both of his parents and of his surrogate mum. Seth is a baby whom New York-based Talissa carries and delivers for London couple, Alaric and Mary. Mary chooses the name Seth,...
Delectable food, but insipid novel
~ The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl ~ Penguin Random House, 2024 Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of her readers must have been like me: a...
Like Switzerland, Big Swiss is a neutral read
~ Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin ~ Scribner, 2023 From the very outset, this book made me smile. It is humorously written, and it is clear the author is the type who likes to surprise her reader, usually by extending...
Theater of Espionage
~ Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only...
Missing on the Tube
~ No One Saw a Thing, by Andrea Mara ~ Bantam, 2023. There have been many novels written about children who are abducted, who have gone missing, who are held captive say in a school building, and all of these...
Ripples in the lives of the Red River Valley
~ The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich ~ Birchbark, 2024. Louise Erdrich is a national treasure. I’d read only two of her books, The Round House and LaRose, and both were gorgeous, deeply emotional without being sentimental, suffused with the...
Crimes on the Reservation
~ Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Books ~ 1970 – 1996. The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the...
Runaways living off the land, in the wilds of Scotland
~ Sal, by Mick Kitson ~ Canongate, 2018 It is hard not to be charmed from the outset at the telling of the story by a precocious 13 year old, who is super protective of her 10 year old sister,...
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