Published by Jonathan Cape, 2020, 272 pages. 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, …
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!
The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLeanPublished by MacLehose Press / Riverhead Books, 2018, 508 pages. Original version published in 2015. "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 …
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All the Beautiful Liars: Sylvia Petter
Published by Lightning Books, 2021, 320 pages. “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 …
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World: Peter Wohlleben
Translated from German by Jane BillinghurstPublished by Greystone Books, 2016, 288 pages. Original version published in 2015. One day, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, stumbles across what he thinks are mossy stones but turn out to be old wood. But not just old wood, which would normally decompose, but the roots of a tree that no …
Piranesi: Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 272 pages. “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens once every eight years.” This is how the book begins. The narrator lives in a vast labyrinth of halls filled …
Small Memories—A Memoir: José Saramago
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Harvill Secker, 2009, 200 pages. Original version published in 2006. José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal. The village has a charter that dates back to the thirteenth century, “but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes …
Disobedience: Naomi Alderman
Published by Penguin / Touchstone, 2006, 288 pages. In London, a beloved Rabbi addresses his congregation in spite of his failing health. The Rav’s voice has lost some of its resonance but the people do not want to believe that he is dying, “he from whom the light of Torah seemed to shine so brightly …
The Moor’s Account: Laila Lalami
Published by Random House / Pantheon / Periscope / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014, 336 pages. History is written by the victors, as the saying goes. What we know of the conquest—or the invasion—of the Americas tends to come from those who conquered the land. This book gives another perspective—the narrator, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, …
Autumn Journal: Louis MacNeice
Published by Faber & Faber, 1939, 96 pages. Louis MacNeice wrote this “journal”—a poem split into 24 parts—from August 1938 to the beginning of 1939. It was a time of uncertainty, with the Second World War looming. This is a poem of endings: the ending of a love affair, of summer, of the year, of …
We are Displaced—My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World: Malala Yousafzai (with Liz Welch)
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019, 224 pages.Review by Mohan Raj A longer version of this review was originally published in The Book Review, Vol XLIV, No. 2-3, Feb-Mar 2020. Reproduced with the permission of The Book Review Literary Trust. Displacement──within and across countries──of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is …
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