In the minimum-wage weeds

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...

Bypassing childhood

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...

Innermost thoughts

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;...

An enigmatic mother, precisely analyzed

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...

Medical missionaries

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...

Top-notch déjà vu

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...

Cubbon Park Crime

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...

Engaging characters, written with kindness

Jess Walter’s novels are warm, engaging, funny, quirky character stories, with a strong connection to his hometown of Spokane, Washington. Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions were both lovely reads. His latest published work is a collection of short stories....

Love, food and ethnicity

Essentially, most of this novel is a paean to the author’s dead mother, and the negotiation of a mixed race child (Korean American) of her Korean identity.   The novel starts by telling us “Ever since my mom died, I...

A bag is a bag is a bag

This funny, light novel tackles several topics: the world of counterfeit luxury goods, the ethical dimensions thereof, the ambition and focus of Chinese immigrants compared to the naivete of second-generation Chinese-Americans, Chinese family dynamics. In this novel, none of these...

Espionage in Ouagadougou

Marie Mitchell is a welcome update to the fictional is spy contingent. She is female, black, and American, all of which give Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel a completely different atmosphere from the classic spy genre dominated by Cold-War British men....

Fear and Poverty

It seems a deeply ironic title – probably intentionally so – given this novel tells 5 stories of lives of Indians which seem mostly to be trapped in a state of fear and want and poverty. One of its protagonists...