Raw Poetry
~ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong ~ Gorgeous is a good description for the beautiful language in this novel. But difficult could be another word, to describe the storyline. I confess I read the novel while only...
Diaspora
Brown Man in a White Man’s City
~ Amnesty, by Arvind Adiga ~ Amnesty is vintage Adiga. Need I say more? After the disappointment of Selection Day (which was by no means awful, just less accessible!), it is a joy to go back to the powerful, punchy,...
Dangers of oversimplification
~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~ A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end. ,Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in...
A Turbulent World
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
A diasporic cast of flat characters
~ The Wangs vs The World, by Jade Chang ~ This is quite a long novel, 49 chapters in 350 plus pages of close set typescript, but having finished it, it seems to have gone nowhere. The plotline runs that...
Conspicuous but invisible
~ The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez ~ The title and the first few pages immediately tell you what the author is trying to accomplish here: tell the stories of Americans whose accomplishments rarely get attention, who both...
Yangban and Ssangnom
~ Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee ~ The novel begins with 22 year old protagonist Casey Han, who has just graduated from Princeton, coming home to Queens, where her Korean immigrant family have always lived, for a...
Minarets on the Village Green
~ This Green and Pleasant Land, by Ayisha Malik ~ This novel is kept extremely lighthearted despite taking on some weighty issues in UK society (such as English identity, the rise of Islamophobia, village mentality, discrimination, hate crime, etc.) The...
Inspector Singh goes to London
~ A Frightfully English Execution, by Shamini Flint ~ It’s tempting to describe Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh novels as ‘cosy mysteries’. They feature an appealingly crusty detective, and are full of sly humour. Despite their lack of pretentiousness, though, they...
Pilgrimage and Patriarchy
~ The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ Can a pilgrimage to honour their mother’s dying wishes bring three bickering sisters together? And can they also examine the ghosts of their past and face the...
Part of a Whole
~ The Farewell, a film by Lulu Wang ~ A smart, touching film about diaspora and culture, The Farewell features Awkwafina in a wonderful starring role as Billi: Chinese-American, living in New York, with a grandmother in Changchun, China. Billi’s...
Vietnamese diasporic rom-com
~ The Bride Test, by Helen Hoang ~ This was an easy reading book, but not necessary one that should be taken too seriously or read in too much depth for understanding of the Vietnamese culture or Vietnamese diasporic society...
Zen and the Art of Curmudgeonly Redemption
~ Professor Chandra Follows his Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam ~ Professor Chopra is the quintessential cantankerous, opinionated, elderly Indian man. He is also a very distinguished Cambridge academician in the field of economics. How distinguished exactly? The novel opens on...
Honour Bound
~ Honor, by Elif Shafak ~ This is neither here nor there perhaps, but the 2012 Viking (hard backed) edition of this novel spells its title as “Honor” while within the pages of the novel, the word is always spelt...
Displacement
~ Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid ~ While all four of Hamid’s novels have been well written, I thought his first (Moth Smoke) and this fourth, Exit West, were the most beautiful: moving, resigned yet optimistic, tackling complex and controversial...
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