Luminous

This is one of those rare books which keeps you reading in a state of enchantment and awe.   Theo Bryne is an astrobiologist and a widower, with a gifted but grief-stricken 9-year old, Robin (named for his parents’ favourite...

East LA Investigations

A black unofficial private investigator on the mean streets of LA. Many readers will think immediately of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, but Joe Ide’s IQ deserves to stand on its own pedestal. IQ stands for Isaiah Quintana, a young man...

Quiet, delightful charm

Mary Lawson charms the socks off me. It is very difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what makes her writing so appealing, but the attraction is there and powerful, from cover to cover, unwavering. This is, on the surface...

Forgettable Asian-Americans

A Taiwanese-American coming-of-age story, set in a blended family? It could have potential. Despite the title, the protagonist is not, in fact, a Tiger Mom, but is Lexa, the result of a romance between her Caucasian-American mother and a Taiwanese...

Migrants, murder and racism

The Fortune Men has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker, so I embarked on this reading experience with the full expectation that it would be of considerable merit – and it did not disappoint. The novel’s plotline is relatively simple,...

Vivid flights

From the start, the writing voice is compelling, both being extremely assured and able to pack in huge amounts of information in a few words. Early on, we hear from one of the two protagonists that, My parents had left...

Cultural appropriation?

Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if...

Understated poignancy

If your tastes in books runs to family relationships and domestic drama, to the understated and the quietly poignant, this is an example of an excellent read. It is not an explosive kind of novel, everything happens very quietly, beneath...

Gods on Earth

It is a cliché that everything is bigger in Texas. In fact, so big as to be Olympian. So goes the conceit of this novel. Set in a fictional town called Olympus, halfway between Houston and Austin, in a sprawling...

Murder at an elderly pace

This is a book which sets out to amuse and entertain. And to some extent, it does this well enough, offering a frothy, light read that carefully avoids straying into the frivolous or the trite. It is a whodunnit, but...

Multi-threaded Roman fabric

Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped...