Atrocity
There are all too few novels written in English on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1942-1945, so I seized on this one and read it avidly. It certainly tells a very important story, though how...
Fiction
But never doubt I love
The novel starts by telling us that Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. O’Farrell’s novel is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s life, without ever mentioning...
Goodnight, sweet prince
The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify...
Charming and distinctive
Although this is one of Toibin’s earlier novels, I had not previously read it; but it felt instantly familiar nevertheless, with his distinctive style. This one is set in Toibin’s own birth county, Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. It...
A diversity of American Muslims
Growing up in Karachi, Anvar was the rebellious, non-conformist kid in the family, snarkily resenting his perfect older brother Aamir. [Aamir] has gone through life checking all the right boxes that a model desi boy should check. […] Somehow he’s...
From Shock and Awe to…LOL
Note: There are no spoilers in this review because, well, it’s just not a Donne thing, to borrow a cheesy line from Anwar, the ‘hero’ of Syed M. Masood’s The Bad Muslim Discount. Spanning continents and decades, encompassing themes of...
Lovable characters described by a born storyteller
I looked for this book because of my huge enjoyment of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, co-authored by Annie Barrows, and her aunt, Marry Anne Shaffer. I just knew Barrows would be a good storyteller, and I...
She’d rather have you laugh at her than feel sorry for her
Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn. No shortage of fodder there....
Shades of Difference
In 1848, Alphonse Decuir, a freed slave, inherited sugarcane fields from his white father. On those acres, Decuir wanted to build [a] town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like...
Cosy Québécois mystery
I first came across Louise Penny in the pages of the Washington Post; her ‘cosy’ mysteries have a large following. Personally, I found her Kingdom of the Blind rather disappointing. That was the 14th book in her series, though, so...
A chronicle of UK diversity
452 pages after completing this read, I am still waiting for the story to start. This is a curious book, with at least a dozen protagonists – and many more secondary characters. Each segment of the novel is devoted...
An incomplete and confusing dystopia
A misogynistic society with an intense focus on human reproduction? Surely the definitive such dystopian-future novel is The Handmaid’s Tale; it almost seems pointless for anyone else to try. What can another author say that Margaret Atwood has not already...
Another exceptional main character with a likeable sidekick; another solid novel
It is amazing what a good writer can pull off! This fairly short novel – just over 200 pages – would have us believe that our protagonist, child prodigy Colin Singleton, by the time he has graduated from high school,...
Byways of upper-crust Pakistan
What can one fairly expect from a debut novel? On the one hand, many writers take a book or two to get their first (often semi-autobiographical) thoughts out of their system and improve their craft. So it seems only fair...
It’s all about the journey
This is a quintessentially British novel, full of the most British of characters, with their eccentricities and oddities and charm. The landscape is recognisably and superbly British, the pace and charm understatedly British, the dialogue and characters even more so....
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