Published by Knopf, 2015, 317 pages. England, a few years after King Arthur’s death. Dragons, ogres and knights roam the land. There is a sort of peace after a fierce civil war—the opposing sides, the Britons and Saxons, coexist. But a mist lies over the land, a mist that clouds people’s minds, taking away their …
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!
V for Vendetta: written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd
Published by Vertigo, 1995, 288 pages. Written in the 1980s, this graphic novel is set in another one of Alan Moore’s dystopian alternative futures. It’s the late 1990s in Britain. A war and a near-miss nuclear conflict has led to the takeover by a fascist government, with Adam Susan at its head. The government is …
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Fiction v Nonfiction – English Literature’s Made-Up Divide (from The Guardian)
As readers in the English-speaking world debate about the merits of fiction over non-fiction, this distinction does not even exist in several cultures. In this article from The Guardian's website, Richard Lea writes about how Bosnian, Arabic, Gikuyu and other languages label (or don't label) genres. "There’s a mighty canyon that runs down the middle …
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Cathedral of the Sea: Ildefonso Falcones
Translated from Spanish by Nick CaistorPublished by Black Swan / Dutton, 2008, 611 pages. Original version published in 2006. The first chapter of this book felt like a piece of music—flutes gently celebrating the wedding of Bernat Estanyol, a Catalonian farmer, and his bride, the lovely Fransesca. Then the approach of the feudal lord Llorenç …
Euphoria: Lily King
Published by Picador, 2015, 272 pages. Using an incident in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead (about a trip that Mead—Nell Stone, in the novel—had taken with her husband to study tribes in New Guinea), Lily King turns it into a story about relationships and the inability to completely know someone, let alone an entire …
Our Lady of the Nile: Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated from French by Melanie MauthnerPublished by Archipelago Press / Daunt Books, 2014, 240 pages. Original version published in 2012. Scholastique Mukasonga paints a picture of a country by focusing on the microcosm of a girls’ boarding school in Rwanda around 1980. Our Lady of the Nile is a secondary school for girls run by …
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My Brilliant Friend: Elena Ferrante
Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Thorndike Press, 2016, 497 pages. Original version published in 2011. Elena Ferrante has become a literary sensation in the Anglophone world with The Neopolitan Quartet, books about a friendship between two women. The books not only chart the story of Elena and Lila’s friendship over several decades but …
The Intangibility of Books: The Digital Bibliophile, by Eric Burns-White
An interesting article on the ongoing and seemingly endless debate on the merits of paper books and ebooks. Personally, I'm very much a paper book person and don't even own a Kindle. But I did enjoy this article on the joys of ebooks--and modern information technology--and thought I'd share it. "We’ve all heard it said that …
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Fiela’s Child: Dalene Matthee
Published by Knopf / Longman, 1986, 350 pages.Review by Sadhana Ramchander The power a woman or an animal has when she is a mother—this is the idea that is central to Fiela's Child. It also asks the question—is identity, which people give utmost importance to—an abstract thing after all? It is a gripping story, set …
Em and the Big Hoom: Jerry Pinto
Published by Aleph Book Company, 2012, 235 pages. Both books I’ve read this month—Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom—have been excellent. And the year has only just begun! Em and the Big Hoom is a moving, funny account of living with a mentally ill, suicidal mother—Em of the …
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