Published by Soho Press, Inc., 2018, 400 pages. This is more than just a crime novel: by setting it in India in the early 1900s, Sujata Massey paints a vivid portrait of the country and especially of the lives of the women at the time. The book starts in Bombay in 1921. The British are …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
Ghost Stories: M.R. James
Published by Penguin and Oxford University Press, 1931, 361 pages. “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...”The Treasure of Abbot Thomas M.R. James is one of the best—if not the best—ghost story writer in the English language. Born in 1862, he …
Hidden Lives—A Family Memoir: Margaret Forster
Published by Penguin, 1995, 320 pages. This is a family memoir: by tracing the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself, Margaret Forster looks at how things have changed for working-class women in the UK. This book brings to light the hidden lives, lives often considered too unimportant to be documented. Forster’s grandmother, Margaret Ann, …
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Love After Love: Ingrid Persaud
Published by Faber Books, 2020, 416 pages. Domestic abuse, homophobia, family secrets...and love. Ingrid Persaud packs it all into this novel set in Trinidad. Betty was married to Sunil, an abusive man, who didn’t stop at hurting his wife but also hit his young son. “That man gave you love you could feel. He cuff …
Rock ‘n’ Roll: Tom Stoppard
Published by Faber and Faber, 2006, 144 pages. This is Tom Stoppard’s play about Czechoslovakia, protest, love, and the power of rock and roll. It covers the years from 1968 to 1990, and the action moves between the house of Max—a staunch communist and a member of the British Communist Party—in Cambridge and the apartment …
Iep Jāltok—Poems from a Marshallese Daughter: Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner
Published by the University of Arizona Press, 2017, 82 pages. From 1946 to 1958, the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in what is now the Marshall Islands, an event which seems to have slipped into the mists of history. But it is still very real for the islanders, as Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet, …
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Snow: John Banville
Published by Faber Books, 2020, 352 pages. “‘The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’” This book begins like a traditional English whodunit: with a body in the library in a country house. It’s a cliché—except that John Banville doesn’t do clichés. He uses a murder mystery to paint a portrait …
Country Driving—A Chinese Road Trip: Peter Hessler
Published by Cannongate and Harper, 2010, 438 pages. Peter Hessler is an American journalist who speaks fluent Chinese and was The New Yorker’s correspondent in China from 2000 to 2007. While he was there, he got himself a Chinese driving licence and travelled through the country. Hessler applied for a Chinese driving licence in 2001. …
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Investigating Indexes: An Interview with Dennis Duncan
Dennis Duncan is a British writer, translator and lecturer. His book, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure, was published in 2021. His other books include The Oulipo and Modern Thought and Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu. He also co-edited Book Parts, a collection of essays on the various …
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A Madness of Sunshine: Nalini Singh
Published by Gollancz, 2020, 352 pages. “That was the town Anahera remembered, the town that had suffocated her, the town where there were no secrets—and far too many hidden things.” Anahera is from Golden Cove, a small town in New Zealand’s South Island. She left for the UK, became a well-known classical pianist and married …
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