A deeply reflective novel
This book does exactly what it says on the tin! It is hard to classify this book, fiction of course, but what kind of fiction? A devotional is exactly the right description. Our protagonist – I don’t think she is...
Fiction
Grief and love: three decades of diasporic family tensions
In 1997 Seattle, a young Indian-American woman called Amina Eapen receives a call from her mother Kamala in Albuquerque. Her neurosurgeon father Thomas, it seems, has started talking to himself, and worse, to his long-dead family members. A little guilt-tripping...
Luminous underwater encounters
This is a novel filled with love for the ocean and everything in it, plus all its unknowns and mysteries and magic. It is, like so many of other Powers novels, also a clarion call to conservation. The novel is...
Ovine Sleuths
Few detectives are as unusual as those in this novel. They work as a team but their leader is most definitely the black sheep of the group. To be precise, a black Hebridean four-horned ram called Othello. The flock of...
An introspective eco-thriller
Being a wuss, I was put off reading Catton’s Booker Prize winning, 800+ paged The Luminaries because it seemed too lengthy, but now I suspect I should just bite the bullet and try it out. Simply because her latest, Birnam...
The Physics of Life and Death
This novel is by no means unique in writing about what happens after the death of someone who has been important in the lives of those they left behind. Recently, by chance, I was reading Anna Quindlen’s After Annie, where the...
A nuanced exploration of race and feminism
It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her wonderful novel Americanah. In the meantime she has not been idle: she has written two books on feminism and one on grief, a collection of short stories, and a children’s...
Understated charm
Having read a few less than glowing reviews of this Patchett novel, I admit I approached it with low expectations. Perhaps that was part of the reason I found it unexpectedly enjoyable. (I have mostly enjoyed all Patchett’s other novels,...
A war story in a generic tropical colony
Set in what was then the Malayan Peninsula (now Malaysia) at the time of the Japanese occupation (1940s), unusually, the protagonist is a Eurasian, Cecily. Eurasians are a minority community in Malaysia, but in the time of the British occupation,...
To be a woman, more than once
Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, is the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize, an award given to the English translation of book written in another language. The prize recognizes “the vital work of translation” –...
Coming to America – Part 2
Habitations – a place where one lives, the process of living. Vega Gopalan thinks she may be pregnant, but she doesn’t want her suspicion confirmed. Confirmation means the decision will be made and Vega is not sure she wants a...
Quirky families
Hundreds of novels are set in New York, San Francisco, LA and so on, but how many novels are set in Baltimore? It might seem too matter-of-fact a city to inspire literary creations, but in fact one of America’s best...
Coming to America – Part 1
Coming to America – Part 1 About three months ago I started two books with, published some 40 years apart, with essentially, the same story line. Both focus on young Indians coming to the US, leaving family and the comforts...
A whodunnit that’s hefty, but worth it
This is a hefty book. When I first came across it, I wondered what whodunnit requires almost 500 pages (nearly double a ‘normal’ length novel). But as the novel begins to unfurl, one realises the length of the novel is...
A slog through history
Historical fiction is not easy to write, I should think. It demands extensive research to be convincing, but at the same time the research needs to be painted in gently, filling the background, with the story in the foreground, and...
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