At its outset, Dava Shastri’s Last Day seems pleasantly nonconformist. The eponymous central figure is a self-made billionaire. Despite having been brought up in the US as an Indian-American, she does not suffer from ethnic existential angst. She marries a...
This most recent of Ishiguro’s novels contains a futuristic take on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our domestic/personal lives. Klara is an AF – Artificial Friend – a sort of human-like robot who is intelligent and even unique, but nevertheless a...
Thrity Umrigar wrote a nuanced and sensitive exploration of the Indian employer-servant relationship in The Space Between Us, but sad to say, her latest novel Honor displays little of that nuance or sensitivity. There are two women at the center...
Having been impressed by A Parchment of Leaves, I was keen to try another Silas House novel, and when I got back to DC, I found several in the Martin Luther King Jr Library. Southernmost begins with a flood in...
At times of tension one returns to the old, familiar, and comforting, and so it was that I spent the early part of 2022 re-reading Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers. Sayers was born in 1897, and her first detective novel...
I wasn’t sure at first whether this would be my kind of book since the protagonist, Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, is a leader in the French Resistance in WWII, and war stories are usually not my favourite genre. However, the...
Set largely in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and following a protagonist through some formative years, The Paper Palace is far from an idyllic coming-of-age tale. The title is the affectionate nickname for a beat-up old house in the Cape woods, where...
I start this review with an apology to the reader; I hardly know how to begin to review such a book. An apology is needed all the more because this is such a remarkable book that I couldn’t hope for...
It is such a pleasure to be in the hands of a master craftsman, and John Le Carré is one indeed. Sure, a few of his novels from the past decade or two have been less exciting, perhaps even pedestrian,...
Ava is a young Irish woman who manages to get out of Ireland by taking up teaching English to children in Hong Kong. She has no vacation for teaching and very little interest in Hong Kong, but manages to be...
Mental illness is a difficult topic around which to center a novel. It would be all too easy to end up with a one-note portrayal of the sufferer which simply evokes sympathy, or leaves the reader relieved that they themselves...
A very topical novel indeed, written from the perspective of itinerant migrant labourers in India who journeyed home on foot when the national Covid lockdown gave them no other option. This is the (fictional) story of 15-year old Meher’s family,...
Several people are enclosed in a manor house, or on an island, or in a train. The weather worsens, and they are trapped for a few days. And then a body is discovered. Over the course of the next few...
Sometimes you pick up a book because it is talked about a lot, or promoted well, or you hear it on the grapevine, read a review, your bookclub selects it, a friend recommends it. And sometimes, just sometimes, the gods...
British WWII novels often have an oldfashioned charm with their dashing doomed fighter pilots or sturdily phlegmatic women keeping up the home front. On the surface, The Kitchen Front would appear to be a pleasant addition to the collection, but...
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