~ Long Island, by Colm Toibin ~ Simon & Schuster, 2024 When we left Eilis at the end of Colm Toibin’s lovely Brooklyn, she had just departed the small Irish town of Enniscorthy to return to her husband in New...
~ The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken ~ Harper Collins, 2023. The writing voice is clear and distinctive as a bell from the very start, a stream of consciousness which runs through the novel which is set within...
~ James, by Percival Everett ~ Doubleday, 2024. I said these kinds of things were adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published 1884 So says Huck Finn during the raft journey...
~ The Story of a Widow, by Musharraf Ali Farooqi ~ Knopf (Canada), 2008. The Story of a Widow is a lovely book by Musharraf Ali Farooqi about a middle-aged woman in Karachi adjusting to widowhood. The story begins as...
~ Table for Two, by Amor Towles ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and...
~ Amreekiya, by Lena Mahmoud ~ University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Isra is the child of a Palestinian (Falasteen) father and an American (white) mother. When her mother dies young (when Isra is only 8), and her father seemingly deserts...
~ The Other Woman: 16 tales of Love and Deception, a collection edited by Monica Das ~ HarperCollins, 2009. n an interview at the end of The Other Woman, a collection of short stories primarily about extramarital affairs, editor Monica...
Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live up to either its cover or Simonson’s first novel. Has she...
~ The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese ~ Grove Press, 2023. Having read Verghese’s other novels (Cutting for Stone, The Tennis Partner, and My Own Country), I was fairly confident I would enjoy his latest, The Covenant of Water....
~ This Other Eden, by Paul Harding ~ W.W. Norton, 2023. It is immediately obvious why the novel is so titled, because Apple Island (42 acres, barely 300 feet from the mainland of the USA), despite seeming so bare and...
~ Erasure, by Pervical Everett ~ Graywolf Press, 2001 Thelonious Ellison is an academic and a writer of fiction. He is also black, and unfortunately, his books do not conform to the publishing industry’s idea of black writing. A typical...
~ Knife, by Salman Rushdie ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a...
~ A Great Country, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda ~ Mariner Books, 2024. Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black...
This novel kicks off with the protagonist, Pearson, being told to take her child home from school because he used unacceptable language, namely, he said his classmate’s T-shirt was stupid – the forbidden S-word. In a dinner party that night,...
When I picked up this collection of short stories, Next Door by Jahnavi Barua, I was intrigued by the idea — to be invited into the homes and lives of strangers. What I didn’t expect was such darkness. Set mainly...
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