A Library of One’s Own
Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly....
Fiction
Growing up and growing old in 1990s Bangalore
A debut author with a collection of short stories set in Bangalore; definitely worth investigating. Most of the stories in Shubha Sunder’s collection, Boomtown Girl , focuses, as befits the title, on girls growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s....
Secrets and Lies
The early wave of South Asian immigrant writing focused on the immigrants themselves: their unfamiliarity with the new country, discrimination, yearning for a home that changed after their departure, and excitement about the opportunities now available to them. The next...
Dickensian Appalachia
The perennial problem with getting one’s hands on a new release by a favourite author, is the reining in of expectations, so as not to unfairly set up a novel for failure/disappointment. It is hard however, not to get excited...
Foul Play in a Pristine Hotel
Novels about neurodivergent people are no longer unusual. After the well-deserved success of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog In the NightTime, there have been several novels with very memorably ‘different’ characters who have to adjust to an...
Legal Role Models
Having been very impressed by Fierce Kingdom, I was eager to try another Gin Phillips novel. This one is not quite as thrilling and suspenseful, but the voice is similar, and similarly engaging. The novel focuses on the relationship between...
Coming of age on the rocks
The title of Allegra Goodman’s novel, and its cover, point to the nature of its content: it is about a girl called Sam. The first sentence of the novel is almost unnecessary. There is a girl, and her name is...
A worthwhile protagonist in a less worthwhile immigrant novel
Yang’s Chinese-immigrant-coming-to-America novel is in some ways similar to others of its genre, in that our protagonist, Ivy Lin, finds herself different from her American peers and longs to fit in. In these ways, Ivy’s tale is like many second...
Gossip Girls in Gujarat
If Indian villages were populated by American teenagers, The Bandit Queens would be a black-humor romp. The novel is inspired by the true story of Phoolan Devi, a poor woman at the bottom of the caste structure in Uttar Pradesh....
Inherited Trauma
This book is predicated on the notion of epigenetic inheritance and generational trauma. The idea is that perhaps people can inherit traumas which they themselves did not experience, but which is somehow written into their genes so that it produces...
Stages of grief
Three unrelated people live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Each one has lost, in some way, someone close to them. These losses have in common that they are recent, and have left the character devastated, but each one is...
Lovely, lively characters
Having loved Liardet’s first novel, We Must Be Brave, I was of course eagerly anticipating this, her second. And once again, right from the start, I found myself in the hands of a skilled storyteller. This novel was set in...
A little gem
Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These, was a little gem, and Foster is another one. A mere 76 pages, it is wonderfully complete: saying everything in just a few words, leaving enough unsaid for the reader to draw their...
An immigrant story in a lively voice
This is a rather charming novel although not entirely novel in material, about immigrants to the USA. The novel show cases immigrants from the Dominican Republic who have moved to New York in search of a better life, income, and...
A circus without magic
Surely The Circus Train contains the most incredibly sanitized description of the Holocaust ever. A description of two prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto includes this line the scant diet of watery soup and moldy potatoes making it nearly impossible to...
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