Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Europa Editions, 2016, 386 pages. Original version published in 2014. How much do you need to know about the writer to be able to enjoy their books? Nothing at all, according to Elena Ferrante, author of the Nepolitan Quartet and other books. She writes under a pseudonym and …
Continue reading Frantumaglia—A Writer’s Journey: Elena Ferrante
Published by Penguin India / The Borough Press, 2002, 560 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian "The Glass Palace” is, for me, a beautiful title for a novel. I love the image it creates of fragility, beauty, brilliance, and utter vulnerability. For years I have reached for Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, and until a few days …
One of the things this blog tries to do is to highlight books from outside the usual UK-US cannon. We live in a rich, varied world, and as readers, we are ideally placed to explore this richness through books. This is what lay behind the reading challenge that some of us set ourselves. From time …
Published by Many Rivers Press, 1996, 98 pages. “At the centre of this lifethere is a man I want to know again.” Do we lose something of ourselves as we scurry through life, running to make the next deadline and dealing with the mundane business of day-to-day life? David Whyte’s poems are a reminder of …
Published by Rider / Parallax Press, 1987, 308 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian In Thich Nhat Hahn’s Old Path White Clouds, subtitled The life story of the Buddha, the first 80 chapters give us an account of the Buddha’s life and work until his death at the age of 80. The 81stchapter (the last) shows the …
Continue reading Old Path White Clouds: The life story of the Buddha—Thich Nhat Hahn
Published by University of Hawaii Press, 1994, 93 pages. If this book were to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “‘Development’ comes to a small Pacific island”. Tales of the Tikongs is a collection of vignettes of what happens when foreign development experts try to impose development on a happy-go-lucky people. And …
Translated from French by Julian EvansPublished by Gallic Books, 2015, 160 pages. Original version published in 2015. On 20 October 2011, the news was full of the capture of the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, found hiding in a culvert in near Sirte. It was an unimaginable fall for the man who saw himself as the …
Published by Penguin, 2014, 304 pages. “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins a book about a family with an absence at its heart—that of the oldest daughter who dies just before her 16th birthday. Although there is a mystery to her death, this is not a whodunit. It’s a story …
https://nyti.ms/2y1K8lS How do you get under the skin of someone else? Thrity Umrigar, an Indian-American writer, talks about the expectations that come with the hyphenated identity: write about what you know, that is, Indians. But that is the point of fiction, surely? That a writer can get inside the head of any character they create, …
Continue reading I’m Indian. Can I Write Black Characters? Thrity Umrigar in the New York Times
Published by HarperCollins India, 2013, 252 pages. For many years, I’ve enjoyed the writing of Vinod Mehta, the editor of the Indian newsmagazine Outlook, so I was looking forward to reading his biography of Meena Kumari, an iconic Indian actress who died in 1972. But the biography was written on a commission soon after her …
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