~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~ A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end. ,Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in...
~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~ This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people. Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience...
~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~ This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of...
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~ Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young...
~ The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell ~ Having read Purcell’s The Corset, perhaps my expectations for the same fine read in The Silent Companions were to set me up for a little disappointment. The novel takes place in three...
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
~ Sarong Party Girls, by Cheryl Li-Lien Tan ~ “Not say the States is very near, you know.” (translation: That is not to say the US is close to Singapore.) p145 “You see, ang mohs in Asia, step one is...
~ The Invoice, by Jonas Karlsson ~ An intensely Scandinavian book (in translation by Neil Smith) where the protagonist who is never named, is surprised one day to receive an invoice of 5,700,000 kroner. His life is much too small...
~ A Taxonomy of Love, by Rachel Allen ~ This is a young adults novel, but reads so well that this genre classification is of no relevance. That said, classification is on the title of this novel, and is a...
Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is a difficult novel to categorize, especially at its start. A 52-year old woman in Florida becomes a member of a 6-person jury on a murder case. (Apparently, in Florida, the storied 12-person jury...
~ Perfect, by Rachel Joyce ~ Joyce’s distinctive writing style (from her bestsellers, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Henessey) is immediately apparent in her latest novel, Perfect. It is so named because...
~ The Wangs vs The World, by Jade Chang ~ This is quite a long novel, 49 chapters in 350 plus pages of close set typescript, but having finished it, it seems to have gone nowhere. The plotline runs that...
~ The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez ~ The title and the first few pages immediately tell you what the author is trying to accomplish here: tell the stories of Americans whose accomplishments rarely get attention, who both...
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