“If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”

In 1922, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for writing a poem that the Bolsheviks find incendiary. The Count’s home at the time of sentencing is a suite at the Hotel Metropole. He is moved out of his suite to a small room on the sixth floor, where furniture and odds and ends are stored. Taking it in his stride, the Count picks out the things dearest to him and has them moved upstairs. He eventually finds a way to break the wall into the room next door—through his closet—and fashions for himself a suite of sorts.

The staff at the hotel know and like the Count. He has managed to stash some money and so is able to live reasonably well, eating at the two restaurants, the Piazza and the Boyarsky, which is more upscale. But living in a confined space starts to take its toll on him.

His ennui is broken by a little girl in yellow, Nina, who befriends him. Nina is staying at the hotel while her parents are away and has plenty of time to explore it, not least because she has managed to acquire a passkey to all the rooms. She opens up the hotel for him, taking him to spaces he did not know existed. When she leaves, she makes him a gift of the key. The next time he sees her, she has grown up into a serious young woman who is leaving to work in the provinces.

The years go by, and the Count settles into a daily routine. But Nina hasn’t finished with him. She shows up unexpectedly with her eight-year-old daughter Sofia, and asks him to take care of her while she goes to Siberia to look for her husband. She never comes back, and the man who had prided himself in not forming long-term relationships finds himself taking care of a child and seeing her into adulthood.

Life at the Metropole reflects the changes outside: the clientele shifts from aristocrats to Party apparatchiks. So does the management: an incompetent waiter, whom the Count dubs the Bishop, becomes the manager through his Party connections. The Count works as a waiter at the Boyarsky where he forms a Triumverate with his good friends, Emile, the chef, and Andrey, the headwaiter. They meet every morning to set (and sample) the day’s menu.    

The Count is a wonderful creation: erudite, courteous, observant and determined not to let his circumstances get the better of him. The hotel is full of vividly drawn characters: the hot-tempered and talented Emile, the unflappable Andrey, the seamstress Marina who teaches the Count how to sew, the actress Anna Urbanova with whom he has an on-off affair, Osip, the Party apparatchik who hires the Count to teach him English and French, and so many more.

I enjoyed Towles’s writing. Here is a description of Andrey’s virtuosity as a waiter: “Having led a group of women to their table…Andrey seemed to pull back the chairs all at once. …[W]hen the woman holding the wine list asked for a recommendation, he didn’t point to the 1900 Bordeaux—at least, not in the Teutonic sense. Rather, he slightly extended his index finger in a manner reminiscent of that gesture on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling with which the Prime Mover had transmitted the spark of life.”

This is a masterful book. I couldn’t imagine how Towles would be able to keep up an interesting story within the confines of a hotel. But all of life is there: intrigue, politics, spies, love and friendship; the life of the country is reflected in the goings-on of the hotel. I have to hand it to Towles: the story never flags.

In keeping with the confines of the setting, Towles has set himself limits for his chapter headings: every one of the words begins with an A. I also loved the little icons at the beginning of each section, depicting something that would be central to that part of the story.

“History has failed us, but no matter.”

Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan, a group of immigrants about whom not a lot has been written in fiction.

The book starts in a little fishing village in Korea. Hoonie, a man with a cleft palate and club foot, and his wife Yangchin run a boarding house in Yeongdo. They have a daughter, Sunja, whom they love. Then Hoonie get tuberculosis and dies. Sunja is seduced by Hansu, a businessman, and becomes pregnant. She thinks he will marry her, but when he admits he has a wife in Osaka in Japan and offers to keep her as a mistress, she refuses to have anything more to do with him. Instead she agrees to marry Isak, a Christian priest and boarder whom she and her mother have nursed through tuberculosis.

Isak and Sunja move to Osaka to live with his brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee, and the two women become very close. Sunja is shocked at the way Koreans live in Japan—treated as second-class citizens, their houses are ramshackle and their neighbourhoods poor. The outsider status is made worse for the family because Josep and Isak are Christians, a minority religion.  

Sunja gives birth to Noa, whom the family raise as their own. She later has a second son by Isak, Mozasu. Then their world falls apart as Isak is arrested for reciting the Lord’s Prayer and released only when he is close to death.

It is a time of war in both countries: Korea’s civil war has split the country into two, and Japan has entered the Second World War. In the meantime, Hansu has been keeping an eye on Sanju and Noa, but only makes contact with Sanju after Isak’s death. He arranges for a safe place for the family in the countryside and brings Yangchin to her daughter. Yoseb finds work in Nagasaki.

The story follows the family through their ups and downs. This is a story of endurance—mostly on the part of the women, especially Sunja, who somehow copes with all the hardship that life throws at her. Lee writes with heart—you invest in these people and feel for them.

And the facts are shocking. Koreans are not recognized as citizens in Japan. They are only granted three-year residency permits, which have to be renewed, no matter how long they had lived in the country or even if they were born there. Obtaining a passport is almost impossible. Not welcome in most regular occupations, the one way of making money was for them to run pachinko parlours, which are gaming arcades (pachinko are slot machines).

Mozasu drops out of school and starts working for pachinko parlours and eventually makes his fortune running them. The more intellectual Noa, on the other hand, pretends to be Japanese and is terrified that he would lose his job if the truth came out. He faces the dilemma of many immigrants who want to take on the identity of their adopted homeland but have their roots elsewhere: in the end, they are neither wholly one or the other. The treatment of Koreans as second-class citizens in Japan doesn’t really change much over time: Mozasu’s son Solomon faces it in the 1980s, although it is so normal for him that it takes his American-born girlfriend to see it.

Min Jin Lee does the story of Korean immigrants justice, painting a vivid picture of their lives and of their losses and triumphs. At a time when migration has become a global issue, and they are often seen as “the other”, we need books like this that depict immigrants as people not that different from anyone else.

This is a rich story, interweaving the lives of people working at a clinic in Addis Ababa run by a Christian mission (known as the Missing Clinic by the local people and everyone else) with the history of Ethiopia from the 1950s to the late 1970s.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise is a Carmelite nun from Kerala, who is sent to work in Africa by the Abbess of her convent. On the ship, she meets Dr. Thomas Stone, a surgeon, who is also going to work in Africa. They both end up working at Missing, with Sister Mary becoming the doctor’s indispensable right-hand person. They seem to have a professional relationship, so everyone—including the doctor—is stunned when Sister Mary goes into labour with twins. She had managed to keep her pregnancy secret from everyone.

The story is narrated by one of the twins, Marion (named after the famed gynaecologist, J. Marion Sims), who starts the story with his birth and that of his twin, Shiva. The birth is complicated—the twins are joined at the skull, and Sister Mary cannot push them out. The resident gynaecologist, Dr. Hema, being away, Dr. Stone is summoned to help. But faced with trying to save the life of the woman he loves, he loses his nerve. The twins survive, only thanks to the arrival of Dr. Hema, but she cannot save their mother. Shattered, Dr. Stone leaves the clinic and the country without acknowledging his children.

The boys are brought up by Hema and the man who becomes her lover and companion, Dr. Ghosh. The boys grow up at the clinic with Genet, the daughter of the maid, Rosina. Their childhood is relatively happy—Hema and Ghosh make good parents, and Marion-Shiva and Genet are inseparable. But adolescence shifts the dynamic between them, leading to a single action which impacts all their lives. Marion feels betrayed by Shiva, and the twins grow apart. Genet deals with her demons by joining the fight for Eritrean independence.

Politics is always present in the lives of the characters. Colonel Mebratu, who Ghosh’s patient, launches a coup d’état against Emperor Haile Selassie. The coup fails, and the Colonel and his driver, Zemui—Genet’s father—are taken into custody. Rosina goes looking for Zemui and disappears for days, and Ghosh is arrested and imprisoned. Then later, when Genet and a group of Eritreans hijack an Ethiopian Airways plane, a woman identifies Marion as Genet’s friend, which means that he has to leave the country. He goes to the United States to work in an inner-city hospital in Boston, which finally brings him face-to-face with his father.

The characters are rounded and nuanced—no one is purely good or bad. Addis is a character in its own right, and Abraham Verghese brings it to life. When Sister Mary goes into labour, the rainy season had just ended, “its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of Missing ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in midsentence. Overnight, in that hushed silence, the meskel flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis Ababa into gold. In the meadows around Missing the sedge won its battle over mud and swept right up to the paved threshold of the hospital.”

Verghese is a medical doctor and so are most of the characters in this book, including the twins. There is a lot of medical detail about operations and diseases, which some readers may find a little overwhelming but I thought worked, given the context.

Verghese covers decades of Ethiopian history, from the remnants of Italian colonialism to the coups against Haile Sailasse and Eritrea’s fight for independence. But this is at heart a book about people and the messy, complicated relationships we all have. Cutting for Stone is a beautifully written book that you can easily lose yourself in.

“The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I remember them all.”

During the Second World War, Beth Weeks was 15, living on a farm in British Columbia with her parents and her brother Dan. Her father, John, used to be a gentle man but became unpredictable and paranoid after he went into the forest chasing a bear that had attacked Beth. The Indians from the nearby reservation said he was taken by the spirit of Coyote, who lies in wait for those who are weak.

John’s mood swings have the family living in a constant state of tension. Dan has been threatening to sign up for the war but he doesn’t trust his father with Beth (with good reason, as it turns out). There is an undercurrent of rebellion in the house because of the way John treats Dennis and Billy, the two hired hands from the reservation nearby. Beth is being pursued by an unseen thing—there are sounds of rushing winds like something is running towards her, but she never sees anything. Could it be Coyote, looking for a wife?

Beth’s mother finds solace by turning to her dead mother for comfort and advice. Beth finds hers in the Indians from the reservation, especially in Billy and Nora, a girl her age with a bell necklace. The girls rebuild Nora’s great-grandmother’s underground hut and go there when Beth’s father or Nora’s mother get too much for them.

Beth’s mother records the events around her in her scrapbook: the day when it rained blue flax, covering the earth in flowers, the time when Sarah Kemp is killed by a bear, and the night John set fire to the hut of the Swede, their neighbour, with whom he had a running battle over boundaries.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has an eye for detail, not just of the landscape but the way people interact with one another. At Sarah’s funeral, her senile grandmother mistakes Beth for her grand-daughter: “The whole crowd was still and staring expectantly, greedily, not shuffling self-consciously as they would if Mrs. Halley would have mistaken one of the pretty Hambrook sisters for Sarah. They watched to see what would happen next. They watched to gossip later.”

The land and the rhythm of the seasons are an intrinsic part of the story. Anderson-Dargatz’s description of living on a farm made me wonder if she was writing from experience—it is so real, you can smell it and hear it. The making of beet wine (there are recipes scattered throughout the book), bringing in the harvest, and the milking of cows every morning, no matter what else is happening in your life. They pick up on your mood, so if you are upset, they can make milking very difficult.

The characters are very well-drawn—no one is entirely good or bad, they’re just regular people with their flaws and strengths. Beth, the centre of the story, is a strong character. She has to deal with a difficult father, bullying in school and a mother who isn’t always there, but somehow manages to get through it. Even John, who is a difficult character to like, has moments of fragility.

And yes, there is a cure for death by lightning, “written in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favorite pancakes:

Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more.”