Rough Roads
~ Winter’s Bone ~ Book and Movie ~ Daniel Woodrell’s slim, bleakly powerful novel Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks, in a house where the road “has got rough to where you about can’t call it a road no...
Books
From Mayur Palli to Gurgaon: Delhi’s Different Worlds
~ The Windfall, by Diksha Basu ~ Diksha Basu’s The Windfall is not as light and flaky as many contemporary ‘society’ novels on the Indian-Writings-in-English literary scene. In fact, it is quite an astute and well observed novel under the...
Good Omens in our future
Good Omens is now a TV series! What a crazy, delightful book! I won’t even attempt to summarize it. Suffice it to say that it involves the Apocalypse, an angel called Aziraphale and a demon called Crowley who are the...
Polychromatic Crime
~ The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder, by Sarah J. Harris ~ In 2003, there was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a ground breaking novel which provided the reader the then rare and charming...
Looking forward to…
Last year we got a new Tana French and a new Robert Galbraith, both of which I had been waiting for impatiently. (If only all my favourite mystery authors would come out with one solidly satisfying book a year). This...
A Hundred Billion Neurons
~ Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains. By Helen Thomson ~ In 1985, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a marvellous book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He describes some of the more unusual cases...
Empowerment through Erotica
~ Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ The Punjabi widows of the title live in London, perhaps not one’s first guess at a location for women living heavily circumscribed lives. But these women live in Southall,...
Sharps and Flats
~ Bel Canto ~ the book and film ~ If only Ang Lee had directed the film of Bel Canto. The exquisite novel by Ann Patchett is widely thought to be her best. It is approximately based on the 1996...
Perfect Pitch
~ Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill ~ Although I was born and brought up in a cricket-mad country and have been surrounded by cricket-o-philes for much of my life, I have no particular interest in the sport and can name only...
Suburban Mores
~ Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng ~ This ambitious book tackles race, class and motherhood in an upscale Cleveland suburb. Race: Shaker Heights, the Cleveland suburb where the book is set, is depicted as largely white with a couple...
Working Mom Redux
~ How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson ~ Kate Reddy encapsulated the realities of life for many working women in 2002, when she appeared as the heroine of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It. (The...
Political Women
~ You Think It, I’ll Say It, by Curtis Sittenfeld ~ The most striking story in Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection is, unfortunately, not included in the American edition. It’s called The Nominee, and it can be read online. The...
Millenial Angst
~ Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney ~ Old-fashioned readers, beware: there are no quotation marks in Conversations with Friends, and text and dialogue flow seamlessly together. Oh, he said.Okay. Well, I’m sorry. I am trying, you know. If there are things I’m doing...
Family Dynamics
~ Cousins, by Salley Vickers ~ There could have been no other possible title as apt for this novel, as Cousins. This is a novel of family love, love between cousins of various generations, love between siblings, parents, aunts, grandmothers, etc....
Memory Leaks
~ The Witch Elm, by Tana French ~ From the very first paragraph, Tana French’s latest novel draws you into the inner thoughts of its protagonist. I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person. I don’t mean I’m...
Recent Comments