As the sweet aromas of freshly-baked bread awaken memories of her apprenticeship at a French boulangerie, she feels the desire and ambition to bake bread once again. Bread, in this novel, is a metaphor for life, healing and finding oneself....
Having read Tahmina Anam’s previous three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, Bones of Grace, sometimes known as the Bengal Trilogy), I was surprised (but not unpleasantly) by this one. Anam’s work in the past had been characterised by...
In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no...
Although this is a novel translated from Japanese into English, the writing is of such good quality that it makes very good reading, even if perhaps not the same reading experience as in its original language. Nevertheless, it imparts a...
MI-6, home of James Bond and George Smiley, is legendary. MI-5, its less famous cousin, deals with domestic intelligence in the UK. It has generally not been featured in novels, perhaps because stalking terrorism on the streets of Brixton seems...
There have been many great Partition novels, but alas, this one will not be joining those ranks. I was so pleased to see another Partition novel when I first spotted this one, and the blurb about the author looked very...
In the late 90s, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a low-wage worker. She wanted to examine, first-hand, the rhetoric surrounding Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which pushed welfare recipients into minimum-wage jobs on the theory that any job...
This novel is written in the best traditions of the reliable narrator, and this first person narrator is very very reliable indeed. Although we meet Anne Marie Grosholtz when she is but a child of six, her tone is already...
Having read Kitamura’s Intimacies (2021), her fourth and most recent publication, I sought out more of Kitamura’s writing because I had rather enjoyed her introspective, almost stream-of-consciousness style. Some reviews have compared Kitamura’s writing to Rachel Cusk’s, with good reason;...
Two boys in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, become friends in the 1940s. They are both fifteen, both Jewish, both highly intelligent, both have fathers who are rabbis, and both study at yeshivas (Orthodox Jewish schools). They have an enormous amount in common,...
We’ve all read a lot of literature on the mother-daughter relationship, and across many cultures for that matter, so although the theme of this novel interested me – a mother who is a bit of an enigma to her daughter...
In 1947, six nuns from Kentucky set off for Bihar, India, to build a hospital in the small town of Mokama on the banks of the Ganges. None of them spoke Hindi, or any other Indian language. None of them...
After the triumph that was Shuggie Bain, I was super keen to read Stuart’s next novel, and was thrilled not to have to wait long – just 2 years – for Young Mungo to be released. But diving into it...
The success of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series has inspired a host of similar series: set in various locales with lots of local colour and female detectives solving mysteries by using their local knowledge as...
This is a collection of short stories, and like most collections, the first story is the strongest one. It is also the title story – The Return Journey – which is the one I will review, because it was quite...
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