Published by Little, Brown and Company / Peepal Tree Press / Sphere, 2016, 264 pages. This is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit from a Grenadian writer. Michael Digson (“Digger”) is out of work, living on the island of Camaho.[1] He is the illegitimate son (“outside child”) of a maid and her employer, the Commissioner of Police. …
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!
Real Life: Brandon Taylor
Published by Daunt Books, 2020, 336 pages. “It was a cool evening in late summer, when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.” Wallace is a young, gay, Black man who is four years into a degree in biochemistry at a predominantly white …
The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
Published by Amaryllis, 2017, 132 pages. The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house …
Continue reading The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
The Powerful and the Damned—Private Diaries in Turbulent Times: Lionel Barber
Published by WH Allen, 2020, 480 pages. From 2005 to 2020, Lionel Barber had what he called “the best job in the world”: editor of the London Financial Times. This is Barber’s account of those years and his close encounters with the great and the not-so-great (or good!). As editor of a major newspaper, Barber …
Continue reading The Powerful and the Damned—Private Diaries in Turbulent Times: Lionel Barber
The Circle of Karma: Kunzang Choden
Published by Zubaan, 2005, 316 pages. This is the story of Pema Tsomo, who grows up in a village in Bhutan. When she is born, the astrologer tells her mother that the child will be restless, always wanting to travel. But, her mother thinks, where can a girl go? Women didn’t leave their homes; they …
WE (a story about us): Susan T. Landry
Illustrated by Benedetta C. VialliPublished by Ebb Tide Press, 2020, 26 pages. It feels like so many people all over the world have become polarized, divided into opposing factions who do not talk to or listen to each other. The recent lockdown has not helped; it has only exacerbated isolation and forced us into our …
The Assassin’s Song: M.G. Vassanji
Published by Vintage Books, 2007, 339 pages. “I often wished my distinction would simply go away, that I would wake up one morning and it wouldn’t be there. I did not want to be God, or His trustee, or His avatar—the distinctions often blurred in the realm of the mystical that was my inheritance. Growing …
Dunbar: Edward St Aubyn
Published by Hogarth Press, 2017, 256 pages. Dunbar, a retelling of King Lear, is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series.[1] Edward St Aubyn sets the story in the present with the King Lear character as a media mogul, Dunbar (shades of Rupert Murdoch?). Dunbar is in an old people’s home, where he has been put …
The Capital: Robert Menasse
Translated from German by Jamie BullochPublished by MacLehose Press, 2019, 411 pages. Original version published in 2017. The European Commission seems an unlikely setting for a novel. But by foregrounding the people who work for the EC, with their individual quirks, worries and talents, Robert Menasse brings the institution to life. Fenia Xenopolou (aka Xeno), …
The Testaments: Margaret Atwood
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2019, 432 pages. “All things come to she who waits. Time wounds all heels. Patience is a virtue. Vengeance is mine.” Margaret Atwood says that the question she was asked most often about The Handmaid’s Tale was what happened next? How did Gilead fall? The Testaments, written 35 years after …
