1634. A ship, the Saardam, is about to set sail from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam. The ship is carrying a secret cargo that only very few know about. On board are the ambitious Governor General of Batavia, Jan Haan, his wife Sara Wessel and daughter Lia, Samuel Pipps, a detective under …
Continue reading The Devil and the Deep Water: Stuart Turton
Translated from French by Alison Anderson Marcus Goldman is a successful writer who has moved to Florida to write his next book. But he is haunted by his past: his point of reference is a “tragedy”, and he measures time from the event. Ever since he can remember, Marcus has looked up to the Baltimore …
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” This is our introduction …
Continue reading The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson
William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire is a chronicle of greed, ambition, and the machinations that put a vast geographical territory under the East India Company (EIC). The book’s epigraph offers a succinct summary of the book’s central theme: “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor …
Note: This book was published as Girl in White Cotton in India and under the title of Burnt Sugar in the UK. Caregiving in the best of circumstances is a fraught business. One that is made more so when it involves a relationship that is itself threadbare, ragged from too much wanting and not having, …
Continue reading Girl in White Cotton/Burnt Sugar: Avni Doshi
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash The year 2020 is coming to a close, finally. And what a year it has been! For weeks on end we stayed confined to our homes, unable to lead normal lives, listening to grim news of the pandemic. But throughout all this, books have opened a door to other …
How do you cope with being the daughter of a famous actress? What does it mean to live with someone for whom performing is not just something she does on stage? Norah’s mother is Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish stage and screen actress. Katherine was a single mother, and Norah and she were close. Now …
Review by Usha Raman My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through one pair of eyes and …
Continue reading Beyond the Seasons—Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean "There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places… they are places that are not within the reach of historians or journalists. They are not invented places… they are not fictions, …
Continue reading The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
“Memories? They’re the bits you feel and the bits you’re told, and they all come together in your mind as sound bytes and snapshots. Some you lose, and some become part of someone else’s memories. Some bits just disappear, and you end up looking for them for the rest of your life, not knowing why, …
