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...
~ The Museum of Failures, by Thrity Umrigar ~ Algonquin, 2023. 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...
~ Long Island, by Colm Toibin ~ Simon & Schuster, 2024 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...
~ Amreekiya, by Lena Mahmoud ~ University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 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...
~ Knife, by Salman Rushdie ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. 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...
~ A Great Country, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda ~ Mariner Books, 2024. 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...
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,...
The blurb intrigued me, being the story of 3 Filipino domestic workers in Singapore, part of the almost 40% strong migrant workforce in Singapore. Angel, Cora, and Donita become friends, and we are give their very different backgrounds and stories,...
When I was 30, a well-intentioned, non-Indian adult suggested I write a letter to my mother, let her know how she had made me feel for decades – get it all out. I smiled and said, Indian daughters don’t do...
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