Stranger than Fiction
~ Stealing Green Mangoes, by Sunil Dutta ~ Two brothers, of whom one grows up to be a cop and one to be a criminal. It sounds like a Hindi film script, indeed. But this dichotomy is just one of...
Diaspora
Host Women
~ The Farm, by Joanne Ramos ~ This is definitely a debut novel. It was a pleasant read, but was flawed in many of the typical ways a debut novel too often is, if lacking editorial support. The title of...
Lives formed in Oxford and Istanbul
~ Three Daughters of Eve, by Elif Shafak ~ An engaging novel, characterised by a distinctive writing style which demonstrates a fine-tuned consciousness and critical awareness. Particularly enjoyable are the author’s acerbic but good tempered observations on Turks, Turkey, and...
The Immigrant Generational Divide
~ Number One Chinese Restaurant, by Lillian Li ~ Joining other recent debut novels by Asian/Chinese American authors such as Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart, 2017) Lily Wang (Family Trust, 2018), Lillian Li’s novel also purports to examine relationships and family...
Asian Cliches: Materialism and Pragmatism
~ Family Trust, by Kathy Wang ~ This novel predominantly set in the Bay Area – though it is also partially sited in Hong Kong, Bali, etc. – features elite Asian Americans who attended Ivy League universities and hold high-paying...
Empowerment through Erotica
~ Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ The first thing to note is that the Punjabi widows of the title live in London, perhaps not one’s first guess at a location for women living heavily circumscribed...
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...
Social Realism: Divorce
~ 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...
Intersecting lives in a fluid history
~ 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,...
Important theme, but unconvincing harvest
~ 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...
Greed? Envy?
~ 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...
In and out of Africa
~ 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...
Surfeit of melodrama
~ 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;...
Guilt, duty, ambition, sacrifice
~ Family Life, by Akhil Sharma ~ Unlike Sharma’s first novel, An Obedient Father, which was set in India, Family Life is a story of Indian immigrants to America. The Mishras, a middle-class Delhi family, migrate to New York in...
Flimsy personalities and plot
~ The Village Bride of Beverley Hills, by Kavita Daswani ~ The Village Bride of Beverly Hills operates on the pleasant conceit that in the cut-throat world of Hollywood journalism, nice girls finish first. And more, even a girl whose...
Recent Comments