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...
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....
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...
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...
Although I began to read this book with eagerness, it is with reluctance that I am reviewing it. I had enjoyed several of Khan’s other novels featuring Inspector Chopra and the baby elephant, mostly set in Mumbai, a lighthearted set...
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....
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...
Nigerian writing in English, both from within the country and from the diaspora, is certainly hitting its stride. This is the latest of several Nigerian-based novels to come my way. The eponymous Glory has just returned to London from a...
Having enjoyed Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, I was happy enough to pick up her next, The Confession, when I saw it. However, maybe it was my enjoyment of the period she invoked in The Miniaturist – 1680s Amsterdam...
Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men? It makes one take a...
I honestly had no idea what to expect from this book having never heard of Megan Abbott, but the front cover had a blub from Kate Atkinson, ‘Deft, intelligent and enthralling’, so I thought well now, if such an accomplished...
The Silent Patient screams ‘unreliable narrator’ from just about the first chapter. Alicia Berensen, a beautiful and talented artist, was found one night with a dead husband, a gun with her fingerprints, and slashed wrists. She survived, but has not...
This is one of Chevalier’s earlier novels – her third actually, after Girl with the Pearl Earring and Virgin Blue – and for some good reason I can no longer recall, I began to read it but didn’t get far...
I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway. Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s...
It was more than 10 years ago when I read a few Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Restoration, Letter to Sister Benedicta), so when I came across this Islands of Mercy published in 2020, and saw from the blurb...
Missing on the Tube
Goodnight, sweet prince
How strange a world that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality
Deep lochs, shallow characters
Beskuit on the veld, with a side of crime
No time for social niceties
Sweet, carbonated, but readable
Homo neanderthalis, homo sapiens, and human consciousness
Inferno of Exploitation
Feeling like an American
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