In Taft, Ann Patchett’s protagonist is about as different from herself as you can imagine. John Nickel is a middle-aged black male former blues drummer who now runs a bar. Then A girl walked into the bar. This teenager, Fay...
It is difficult to know how to review this book, because while it reads easily enough, it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Perhaps it is more a case of travelling backwards in memories in order to figure out how...
A small beach town in Cape Cod. A family who has rented the same house there for decades, year after year. The middle-aged parents, daughter, son and son’s girlfriend all get along pretty well. These are the apparently peaceful circumstances...
I was not familiar with the term ‘slow journalism’ which, per a search, has multiple definitions (my favorite is “unbreaking news”). Words that fit Radhika Iyengar’s Fire on the Ganges include “storytelling” and “taking time” – to listen, to observe,...
I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my father Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of...
This book does exactly what it says on the tin! It is hard to classify this book, fiction of course, but what kind of fiction? A devotional is exactly the right description. Our protagonist – I don’t think she is...
In 1997 Seattle, a young Indian-American woman called Amina Eapen receives a call from her mother Kamala in Albuquerque. Her neurosurgeon father Thomas, it seems, has started talking to himself, and worse, to his long-dead family members. A little guilt-tripping...
This is a novel filled with love for the ocean and everything in it, plus all its unknowns and mysteries and magic. It is, like so many of other Powers novels, also a clarion call to conservation. The novel is...
Few detectives are as unusual as those in this novel. They work as a team but their leader is most definitely the black sheep of the group. To be precise, a black Hebridean four-horned ram called Othello. The flock of...
Being a wuss, I was put off reading Catton’s Booker Prize winning, 800+ paged The Luminaries because it seemed too lengthy, but now I suspect I should just bite the bullet and try it out. Simply because her latest, Birnam...
Many of us have had the experience of surgery in a hospital, either for ourselves or people around us. The routine may be familiar if fraught: nurses briskly entering and leaving, vital signs checked at apparently random intervals, those bright...
This novel is by no means unique in writing about what happens after the death of someone who has been important in the lives of those they left behind. Recently, by chance, I was reading Anna Quindlen’s After Annie, where the...
It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her wonderful novel Americanah. In the meantime she has not been idle: she has written two books on feminism and one on grief, a collection of short stories, and a children’s...
This is not one of Quindlen’s lovely novels, but a non-fiction where she writes her thoughts on life and life’s lessons. It was a highly enjoyable read because I relish her writing voice, its clarity and charm, and also enjoyed...
Having read a few less than glowing reviews of this Patchett novel, I admit I approached it with low expectations. Perhaps that was part of the reason I found it unexpectedly enjoyable. (I have mostly enjoyed all Patchett’s other novels,...
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