Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, is the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize, an award given to the English translation of book written in another language. The prize recognizes “the vital work of translation” –...
Habitations – a place where one lives, the process of living. Vega Gopalan thinks she may be pregnant, but she doesn’t want her suspicion confirmed. Confirmation means the decision will be made and Vega is not sure she wants a...
Coming to America – Part 1 About three months ago I started two books with, published some 40 years apart, with essentially, the same story line. Both focus on young Indians coming to the US, leaving family and the comforts...
Historical fiction is not easy to write, I should think. It demands extensive research to be convincing, but at the same time the research needs to be painted in gently, filling the background, with the story in the foreground, and...
I could not wait to read this book. Rushdie has written 22 books in his 77 or 78 years of life, and of those, only 2 have been non-fiction – Joseph Anton, and now Knife. These are the only 2 books...
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...
“The Hanuman Chalisa by Tulsidas is one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the world. Tens of millions of people recite it by heart, and chant it daily, as well as in times singularly joyful or sorrowful—or when they...
In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and...
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...
In a way, it feels unnecessary to review this novella, because Colm Toibin’s Foreword already did such a good job of reviewing it, very comprehensively and in the most complimentary of terms. The novel’s protagonist is Bombayite Sandeep, 10 years...
~ 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...
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
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...
The Story of a Widow is a lovely book by Musharraf Ali Farooqi about a middle-aged woman in Karachi adjusting to widowhood. The story begins as Mona Ahmad reflects on her marriage and wonders what, if anything, she should do...
n an interview at the end of The Other Woman, a collection of short stories primarily about extramarital affairs, editor Monica Das says she was interested in studying the literary representation of polygamy and bigamy and their adverse socioeconomic impact...
Contemporary Irish
A slog through history
A readable rehashing of stereotypes
Officers and convicts
Sensitive portrayal of a class divide
Dangers of oversimplification
Banaras – City of life, death and desire
Portrait of a Marriage
Nuggets of observation, but too few of them
An immigrant story in a lively voice
Recent Comments