Nayantara Roy’s debut novel is a nicely complex addition to the Indo-American fiction genre. Her protagonist, Lila De, was born in Kolkata and lived there until she was 16, when she moved to America to join her father and stepmother...
I didn’t like the word indifferent either. It was just two letters off from the word that I hate. Joanna, the protagonist in Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, has similarities to this same author’s protagonist in Rental House. Both protagonists...
Inter-culture marriages and the conflicts therein are solid fodder for novels, and many authors have explored their literary potential: Celeste Ng, Laila Lalami, Chimamanda Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi just for starters. In Rental House, Weike Wang...
Every parent’s worst nightmare: a missing child. In Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You, the reader is not kept in suspense about what happened to 16-year-old Lydia, who lives with her family in a peaceful small Ohio college...
In Edison, our hero Prem is challenged to explain “What is good about Hindi movies?” It’s not something he has thought about – to a devotee, they just are. Pondering the question, he comes up with They crammed it all...
The largest concentration of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States is found in and around Washington DC, and that’s where this novel is set. The protagonist, Mamush (a fond family nickname) is Ethiopian-American, born and raised in the US, but...
~ A History of Burning, by Janika Oza ~ Grand Central Publishing, 2023 He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History...
This is by no means the worst of Umrigar’s novels, but it is not her best either. It is a very readable, pleasant novel, set within a Parsi community in Bombay. This novel is fairly conventional, the classic story of...
When we left Eilis at the end of Colm Toibin’s lovely Brooklyn, she had just departed the small Irish town of Enniscorthy to return to her husband in New York; the Italian husband that no one in Ireland knew about,...
Isra is the child of a Palestinian (Falasteen) father and an American (white) mother. When her mother dies young (when Isra is only 8), and her father seemingly deserts them, she is brought into Amu and Amtu’s household (literally, uncle...
At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the...
Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. Some parts of the Indian-American community stayed out of...
It’s not that the storyline lacks plausibility. Some of us are all too familiar with the NRI engineer, MD or MBA grad who goes to India for 3 weeks and comes back married to a virtual stranger, the so-called ‘marriage...
Driss Guerraoui dies in a hit-and-run accident in a small California Mojave town. Driss is a Moroccan immigrant, so there are inevitable threads of racism running through his backstory and the investigation of his death, and through the reactions of...
Angie Kim’s second novel, after her first, Miracle Creek, follows much the same format, style, and even texture, as her first. This is not a criticism, however, because both novels are well done, well written, well planned. Her second, Happiness Falls,...
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