Published by Hogarth Press, 2015, 320 pages. “God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness.” A man driven crazy by jealousy, a wife accused of adultery and a lost child: this is Jeanette Winterson’s take on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.[1] But unlike Othello, The Winter’s Tale …
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!
Flicker: Theodore Roszak
Published by Summit Books / Chicago Review Press, 1991, 608 pages. “[E]ntertainment rules more lives than art and rules them more despotically. People don’t put up their guard when they’re being entertained. The images and the messages slip through and take hold deeper.” Flicker is a thriller, a history of film (with a conspiracy …
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesPublished by Fitzcarraldo Press / Thorndike Press, 2019, 274 pages. Original version published in 2009. “[S]ometimes I feel we’re living in a world we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with …
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32 Yolks—From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line: Eric Ripert
With Veronica ChambersPublished by Random House, 2017, 256 pages. “Only if you cook what you love and truly understand will people be happy with your food.” Good food—how it can sustain you, both physically and emotionally—is the centre of these memoirs. Eric Ripert, a well-known chef, writes about growing up in France and Andorra, and …
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The Sultanpur Chronicles—Shadowed City: Achala Upendran
Published by Hachette India, 2018, 360 pages. Welcome to a world of magic, flying carpets and rakshasas[1]! Before I go any further, full disclosure: Achala Upendran is a friend. This is her first novel. Sultanpur is a vast empire, ranging from mountainous Firozia to the cities of Dastakar. It is home to humans, djinns and …
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The Selector of Souls: Shauna Singh Baldwin
Published by Penguin Random House / Vintage / Knopf Canada, 2012, 560 pages. As the book begins, Damini commits a crime because she believes there is no choice. No one sees her commit it except the goddess Anamika Devi (the Unnamed One), but it haunts her. With this incident, Shauna Singh Baldwin sets up the …
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Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Madeleine Thien
Published by Knopf Canada / Granta Books, 2016, 480 pages. “It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a …
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Frankenstein in Baghdad: Ahmed Sadaawi
Translated from Arabic by Jonathan WrightPublished by OneWorld Publications / Penguin, 2018, 272 pages. Original version published in 2013. Ahmed Sadaawi takes the story of Frankenstein and transposes it to Baghdad in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. Bombs go off regularly on the streets and people die every …
A Broken Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen’s Secret Chord—Liel Leibovitz
Published by Sandstone Press, 2014, 256 pages. “Lots of writers have dared walk up to the edge of reason and stare into that great chasm, into the abyss. Very few people have got there and laughed out loud at what they saw. It’s the divine comedy.” —Bono, on Leonard Cohen You either love or hate …
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Sarah’s Key: Tatiana de Rosnay
Published by John Murray / St. Martin's Press, 2007, 294 pages. “He closed his eyes, like so many other Parisians, during that terrible year of 1942. He had closed his eyes the day of the roundup, when he had seen all those people being driven away, packed on buses, taken God knows where. … My …
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