When the story first begins, our protagonist, Libby (14), is in a car, sitting in the back with Thomas (18) her older brother, and Ellen (12) her younger sister in the middle. Her mum, Faye, is driving, and eldest sister...
There’s a recent spate of American novels which expose the toxic reality of apparently exciting jobs. The Nanny Diaries featured a young white woman working as a nanny for wealthy New Yorkers, and revealed that the employers were jealous, self-centered,...
It must be admitted that I picked up this book displayed in the New Books section in the library because the blurb at the back said, “A beautiful tale for everyone who likes to end a book with a smile...
It is no secret that the Indian-American middle class community is ambitious and competitive. Immigrants with professional backgrounds and advanced degrees who arrive in a new country typically push their children to even higher achievements. Many novels have described the...
Once again like her penultimate novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, Shriver presents us with a couple (though British this time, not American) who are in the mid-later stages of life, as our protagonists. And once again, they...
In apartheid South Africa, the ruling white party created Bantustans, or ‘black homelands’, with the goal of migrating the entire black population out of their own homeland into these barren areas according to their assigned tribal definition. The Zulus would...
This is a novella (just 157 pages) by Lahiri which she originally wrote in Italian, then translated herself, into English. It has over 45 chapters, so you can guess that each chapter is quite short. In expected Lahiri style, the...
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beloved American classic. Its story of an Irish-American girl growing up in poverty in 1900s Brooklyn has charmed readers for over 80 years. Tomorrow will be better is one of Smith’s...
A fairly avid reader of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs, I am not one to turn up my nose at non-Conan Doyle authored novels utilising the well known, well loved characters of the Holmes brothers, Dr Watson, and Mrs Hubbard. My favourite...
Such a long title for these 2 short stories, which come to just a little over 100 pages in all. This will not be a review which is demanding or interrogating, because much of the pleasure of reading a Mary...
Las Vegas is famous for its excess — money! lights! shows! gambling! entertainment! tourists! It seems somehow appropriate that Paradise, Nevada, set in the area containing the Las Vegas Strip, is also excessive — in this case, with an overload...
Half the fun of visiting a new place is reading a book set in that area. So when I was in Long Island, New York, recently, I picked up a recommended book by Nelson DeMille. Page Two gives the reader...
There are all too few novels written in English on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1942-1945, so I seized on this one and read it avidly. It certainly tells a very important story, though how...
The novel starts by telling us that Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. O’Farrell’s novel is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s life, without ever mentioning...
The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify...
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