Love, food and ethnicity
Essentially, most of this novel is a paean to the author’s dead mother, and the negotiation of a mixed race child (Korean American) of her Korean identity. The novel starts by telling us “Ever since my mom died, I...
Books
A bag is a bag is a bag
This funny, light novel tackles several topics: the world of counterfeit luxury goods, the ethical dimensions thereof, the ambition and focus of Chinese immigrants compared to the naivete of second-generation Chinese-Americans, Chinese family dynamics. In this novel, none of these...
Traditional crime-fiction with a massive historical background
Although I began to read this book with eagerness, it is with reluctance that I am reviewing it. I had enjoyed several of Khan’s other novels featuring Inspector Chopra and the baby elephant, mostly set in Mumbai, a lighthearted set...
Espionage in Ouagadougou
Marie Mitchell is a welcome update to the fictional is spy contingent. She is female, black, and American, all of which give Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel a completely different atmosphere from the classic spy genre dominated by Cold-War British men....
Fear and Poverty
It seems a deeply ironic title – probably intentionally so – given this novel tells 5 stories of lives of Indians which seem mostly to be trapped in a state of fear and want and poverty. One of its protagonists...
‘Omo britico’ (British Girl)
Nigerian writing in English, both from within the country and from the diaspora, is certainly hitting its stride. This is the latest of several Nigerian-based novels to come my way. The eponymous Glory has just returned to London from a...
Three Women
Having enjoyed Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, I was happy enough to pick up her next, The Confession, when I saw it. However, maybe it was my enjoyment of the period she invoked in The Miniaturist – 1680s Amsterdam...
Reading Exercises
Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men? It makes one take a...
The sensation-laden internal life of a young teen
I honestly had no idea what to expect from this book having never heard of Megan Abbott, but the front cover had a blub from Kate Atkinson, ‘Deft, intelligent and enthralling’, so I thought well now, if such an accomplished...
Flat and predictable
The Silent Patient screams ‘unreliable narrator’ from just about the first chapter. Alicia Berensen, a beautiful and talented artist, was found one night with a dead husband, a gun with her fingerprints, and slashed wrists. She survived, but has not...
Class and suffrage in Victorian England
This is one of Chevalier’s earlier novels – her third actually, after Girl with the Pearl Earring and Virgin Blue – and for some good reason I can no longer recall, I began to read it but didn’t get far...
Feeling like an American
I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway. Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s...
Another novel where the ‘locals’ serve as background colour
It was more than 10 years ago when I read a few Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Restoration, Letter to Sister Benedicta), so when I came across this Islands of Mercy published in 2020, and saw from the blurb...
An uncommonly multicultural family with common problems
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...
Deceptively simple and beautifully rendered
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...
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