~ Mulligatawny Soup, by Manorama Mathai ~ A young woman decides to discover more about the Indian father who abandoned her English mother to return to Calcutta. Superficially this might sound like a teenage finding-onself tale, but this is really...
~ Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata ~ Keiko, the protagonist of this 2018 novella, is in what is generally described as a “dead-end” job, working in a convenience store in Japan for the past 18 year, or all her...
~ Custody, by Manju Kapur ~ This novel contains Manju Kapur’s most radical protagonist to date. If one regards Kapur’s five novels as a series in her ouevre, Custody challenges Indian tradition and Indian middle class gender roles in a...
~ The Right Side, by Spencer Quinn ~ Chet and Bernie are beloved literary characters in Spencer Quinn’s earlier books, but he has created a completely distinct, remarkable character in The Right Side. LeAnne Hogan, the protagonist of The Right...
~ A Disobedient Girl, by Ru Freeman ~ “She loved fine things and she had no doubt she deserved them.” This is the opening sentence of this debut novel, and one which made me smile. A good, provocative opening sentence...
~ A God in Every Stone, by Kamila Shamsie ~ For those of us who are avid Shamsie-readers, this sixth novel is an eagerly awaited one. Kamila Shamsie’s first four novels (In the City By the Sea, Salt and Saffron,...
~ In the Country of Deceit, by Shashi Deshpande ~ In the Country of Deceit is an entirely and distinctively Deshpande novel; the texture, the characters, all typically and instantly recognisably of Deshpande’s voice and style. For admirers of Deshpande’s...
~ Foreign, by Sonora Jha ~ The context of this novel contains many interesting elements: the protagonist is an Indian woman who after rejection by her son’s father, migrated to the US and had not been back to visit India...
~ The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund. By Anita Raghavan ~ The billionaire of the title is Raj Rajaratnam, the charismatic, Sri-Lanka-born hedge fund CEO whose success was built...
~ Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ~ This extremely accomplished novel is Adichie’s fourth: a marvellous discussion of the identities of middle class Nigerian immigrants to America and UK, as well as migrant returnees to Nigeria. The central protagonists are...
~ Alternate Side, by Anna Quindlen ~ Is a book only interesting if the characters have problems? Or, conversely, does it make a book uninteresting if the characters live lives of extreme privilege with few crosses to bear? Anna Quindlen’s...
~ How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid ~ I am left curiously pleased and yet discontented by Mohsin Hamid’s third novel. Hamid seems to have come to fame as a result of his 2nd novel. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which...
~ The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert ~ Eat Pray Love, and its sequel, Committed, made Elizabeth Gilbert a celebrated author. Those were pleasant enough reads: warm and sincere, if a trifle too gushing; lively and entertaining, if...
~ Video, by Meera Nair ~ It’s hard to browse a bookstore these days without coming across a book of short stories from India or the diaspora. Some such collections may therefore not get all the attention they deserve, and...
~ Madras on Rainy Days, by Samina Ali ~ In her first novel, Samina Ali has fallen prey to that common problem of first-time novelists: the temptation to stuff every possible ‘issue’ into a single story. Which is a pity;...
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