He Said, She Said
Set in late 2016, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a friend, Marco Rosedale, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman forty years earlier. An expat Brit living in America, Marco gets a call one day from a...
Books
Dark tapestry with glints of gold
This is a novel set in Zamana, a (fictional) city in Pakistan, a place of violence and fear and mob riots and religious intolerances, where love still tries to flourish, where atrocities and human rights violations are daily fare, and yet...
More beskuit, but less satisfying
Charmed as I was by Sally Andrew’s first novel, Recipes for Love and Murder, I was looking forward to her second mystery, also set in the Klein Karoo of South Africa and featuring Tannie Maria, a middle-aged widow who likes...
Original and sweet
The school bus seems an extremely hostile place, particularly at the back, from the start. Our protagonist, Park, starts out by pressing his earphones in and trying to plan music which may drown out the noise and slight bullying. This...
Trouble with Words
Imbued in gangster-noir ambiance from the start, one expects Prohibition-era shootouts, hardboiled men of action, and gorgeously cynical cigarette-smoking women from Motherless Brooklyn. Indeed, the opening chapter is classic: We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth street, a...
Lovely Literary Layers
If ever a reader was seeking a book built on an excellent cast of characters, this will fit the bill beautifully! It is a book by a consummate storyteller, about a storyteller, and in an entirely unobtrusive but quietly pleasing...
Mental Illness in the Teenage Mind
Impossible not to pick up a book with such a title! And having read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, I was expecting good things – and was not disappointed. This time, our protagonist is Aza Holmes, and although...
The Bracelet
I feel drained at the end of an Elena Ferrante novel. Her precisely detailed representations of the inner emotions are riveting and incredibly powerful, but also feel a little bit like watching a medical dissection. Every thought, whether charmingly appealing...
Cross-cultural Chasm
This book is about a failed cross-cultural English-Pakistani marriage, which resulted in the Pakistani father spiriting his two children off to Karachi without letting the mother know where they had gone. The reader looking for a sensitive unpacking of cross-culture,...
Irish Island Potboiler
An island several miles off the mainland. A group of people who are invited there for an event. The weather gets worse. A body (or more?) is found, and several people have a long history (and therefore a strong motive)...
Nuances of class, respectability and affluence
Having been impressed by Silver Sparrow (2011) and An American Marriage (2018), I sought out Jones’s second novel, The Untelling (2005) (her debut novel is Leaving Atlanta, 2002). This novel once again features a young, black woman as protagonist, and...
Spokane, 1909: Cauldron of unrest and inequality
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins had a delightfully unexpected plot: it featured Richard Burton, the filming of Cleopatra in Italy in 1963, the 2010s in Hollywood and reality TV, a proposed screenplay about the Donner Party , and the Pacific Northwest...
Skin colour, politics and poverty
One of those books you are glad your bookclub chose so that you read it! Trevor Noah is of course a well known public figure; this book gave a very comprehensive understanding of the South Africa he grew up in,...
Affectionate Chaos
There’s a lot going on in Strangers and Cousins. There are family dynamics: Bennie and Walter, parents of four children ranging in age from 5 to 22, are preparing for the wedding of their oldest, Clem(entine), who is marrying her...
Shellshock
It seems to have taken me four decades of reading, to come on a startling realisation midway through this novel, exactly why I so value the imaginative, innovative, skillfully crafted writing styles when reading novels, above the pedestrian and prosaic...
Recent Comments