Women at War
Women are typically at the margins of war history: they send their men off with pride and sorrow, they serve as camp followers, they nurse the injured, they hold up the fort back home, and they mourn the fallen, while...
Pedestrian Fare
You know how some novels are so good that as you are reading them, you are making a mental note to find more writing by the same author? Well, this is the opposite – I am making a mental note...
Hens and Weans
Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, deserves all its accolades. To successfully distill real life into fiction is something only highly gifted novelists can achieve, and that this was written by a debutant, is eye opening. It is...
Wintry Mix
Recently the Washington Post held a poll on the best fictional detectives, and the winner was Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache. Mortified by my ignorance about this author and detective, I put the first available Penny novel, Kingdom of the Blind,...
Come for a love-up
Neither romantic love, nor love within traditional nuclear families is at the center of this novel. Set among the Indian community of Trinidad and Tobago, Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love follows the love between and around three characters whose love...
A Flourishing Correspondence
As soon as I began this novel, I began to despair at how slim the volume felt in my hands, because this is the kind of read one hopes will last for many hours. Right from the outset, the plot...
Remaking History
Many historians, opinion writers and regular people have speculated whether being married to Bill has helped or hurt Hillary Clinton. The opinions are mixed: some think that her years as First Lady brought her public prominence and jumpstarted her senatorial...
Endearing but nondescript characters
This is Niven’s second Young Adult novel (though she has also written adult fiction and non-fiction), but the first one I have read by her – apparently, she was celebrated as a NY Times bestseller for All the Bright Places. I...
Self-absorption against a violent, lovely background
So confident and effortless is this novel, I had to check twice to confirm that it was indeed a debut. It is very specific to its characters and places and makes no claims to grand ideas, but still makes some...
Life’s Later Decades
I was so pleased to begin this novel and find the protagonist is a 60 year old – Serenata, living with her 64 year old husband, Remington. Pleased because increasingly, it intrigues me to have a perspective of life from...
He Said, She Said
Set in late 2016, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a friend, Marco Rosedale, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman forty years earlier. An expat Brit living in America, Marco gets a call one day from a...
Dark tapestry with glints of gold
This is a novel set in Zamana, a (fictional) city in Pakistan, a place of violence and fear and mob riots and religious intolerances, where love still tries to flourish, where atrocities and human rights violations are daily fare, and yet...
More beskuit, but less satisfying
Charmed as I was by Sally Andrew’s first novel, Recipes for Love and Murder, I was looking forward to her second mystery, also set in the Klein Karoo of South Africa and featuring Tannie Maria, a middle-aged widow who likes...
Original and sweet
The school bus seems an extremely hostile place, particularly at the back, from the start. Our protagonist, Park, starts out by pressing his earphones in and trying to plan music which may drown out the noise and slight bullying. This...
Trouble with Words
Imbued in gangster-noir ambiance from the start, one expects Prohibition-era shootouts, hardboiled men of action, and gorgeously cynical cigarette-smoking women from Motherless Brooklyn. Indeed, the opening chapter is classic: We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth street, a...
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