Books

Jump off the beam, flip off the bars

Having enjoyed watching the gymnasts at the Paris Olympics 2024, I marvelled at their skill and also at their ability to take all the pressure. But I lacked the imagination to think of the parents of these young people, and...

Love and death in Teetarpur

In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and...

Inferno of Exploitation

I was surprised to see emblazoned across the front cover, ‘The Uncensored Original Edition’, which has apparently been lost for over 80 years (the copy I had is published by Sharp Press in 2003); the original was first published in...

All The Single Ladies

There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun,...

In the Darkling Wood

I was expecting a book of some originality just from my initial browse, and I was not disappointed. This is an unusual read, beautifully crafted, which makes land and landscape the key protagonist. Our human protagonist is Lamentations Callat, sometimes...

A pleasant immigrant story

The best thing about this novel, is that it a migration-Vietnamese American diaspora story, without being too overtly so. The focus of the story is more character driven, than migration or cultural differences or migrant angst/mistreatment driven. The chapters are...

Book->Film

Some great books have been made into wonderful films. Some have suffered greatly in the transition from page to screen. Here’s my take in no particular order, what’s yours? Great book, great film Great book -> Disastrous film/TV Terrible book...

Delectable food, but insipid novel

~ The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl ~ Penguin Random House, 2024 Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of her readers must have been like me: a...

Like Switzerland, Big Swiss is a neutral read

~ Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin ~ Scribner, 2023 From the very outset, this book made me smile. It is humorously written, and it is clear the author is the type who likes to surprise her reader, usually by extending...

Theater of Espionage

~ Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only...