Living Color
~ The Vanishing Half. By Brit Bennett ~ This year, especially, the profound overt and subtle effects of race on life in America have exploded into broad daylight. If it were possible, how many people would choose to be a...
Fiction
Curiously familiar colonial expats
~ Woman of Cairo, by Noel Barber ~ [This review would make better sense if the reader first read my review of Noel Barber’s Tanamera] Despite being set in Cairo – where Tanamera was set in Singapore – both novels...
Rollicking Irish charm
~ The Godforsaken Daughter, by Christina McKenna ~ McKenna writes novels set in Ireland, and The Godforsaken Daughter is one in a trilogy; the other two are The Misremembered Man and The Disenchanted Widow. Her writing is charming – she...
Aqueous Profundity
~ Braised Pork, by An Yu ~ This debut novel by An Yu starts with a bang. Jia Jia walks into the bathroom to ask her husband which scarf he prefers, and finds him dead in the bath. She does...
Decorum and Emotion
~ Fall on Your Knees, by Anne-Marie Macdonald ~ This novel is set around the Piper family, migrants to New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1900s. James Piper (whose mother tongue is Gaelic) is a...
What Goes Through the Mind of a Man
~ Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler ~ Micah Mortimer is such a realistic character that he might as well live next door. (As it happens, he lives not very far from me, in Baltimore). He’s...
Alienation, at home and abroad
~ Signs for Lost Children, by Sarah Moss ~ This is 1880, Falmouth, Cornwall, where two rather extraordinary people for their age and time live, Tom and Ally (Alethea). They are extraordinary people in their own right, and an extraordinary...
1.5 millions tons per second
~ Pompeii, by Robert Harris ~ To most of us, the title of this book has only one meaning: the city near Naples that was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Indeed, that is the event at...
Grace and Courage
~ The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve ~ We start this novel with Grace and Gene in a pretty little house on the coast of Maine, with their toddler Clare and baby Tom. It seems a perfect little family...
Upscale navel-gazing
~ All Adults Here, by Emma Straub ~ This is not an ambitious, sweeping novel. It is a small story set in a small place: Clapham, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, an essentially well-to-do little town, the kind of place...
Colonial Singapore
~ Tanamera, by Noel Barber ~ When I first saw this title, I didn’t recognise it straightaway, being more accustomed to reading it as 2 separate words: ‘Tanah Merah” – Merah is red, and Tanah is soil, land, even territory....
Survival and Resilience
~ Little Family, by Ishmael Beah ~ Somewhere in Africa, in a clearing on the edge of a small town, a boy sits among the grasses, motionless, unresponsive, looking into the distance. When you look again to where the boy...
Biting Satire
~ At Last, by Edward St Aubyn ~ This is the last book in Melrose series, based on the dysfunctional, charming, devastated and devastating Patrick Melrose. The cover blurb calls it a “masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional...
Enigmas
~ The Unseen World, by Liz Moore ~ The first few pages of The Unseen World suggest a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances. Ada is 13, living in Boston with her father, a dedicated intellectual...
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