Endless angst
It is difficult to know how to review this book, because while it reads easily enough, it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Perhaps it is more a case of travelling backwards in memories in order to figure out how...
Fiction
A dull week at the beach
A small beach town in Cape Cod. A family who has rented the same house there for decades, year after year. The middle-aged parents, daughter, son and son’s girlfriend all get along pretty well. These are the apparently peaceful circumstances...
Far gone, but not completely lost yet
I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my father Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of...
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...
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...
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