Published by Soho Press, Inc., 2018, 400 pages. This is more than just a crime novel: by setting it in India in the early 1900s, Sujata Massey paints a vivid portrait of the country and especially of the lives of the women at the time. The book starts in Bombay in 1921. The British are …
Category: Fiction
Ghost Stories: M.R. James
Published by Penguin and Oxford University Press, 1931, 361 pages. “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...”The Treasure of Abbot Thomas M.R. James is one of the best—if not the best—ghost story writer in the English language. Born in 1862, he …
Love After Love: Ingrid Persaud
Published by Faber Books, 2020, 416 pages. Domestic abuse, homophobia, family secrets...and love. Ingrid Persaud packs it all into this novel set in Trinidad. Betty was married to Sunil, an abusive man, who didn’t stop at hurting his wife but also hit his young son. “That man gave you love you could feel. He cuff …
Rock ‘n’ Roll: Tom Stoppard
Published by Faber and Faber, 2006, 144 pages. This is Tom Stoppard’s play about Czechoslovakia, protest, love, and the power of rock and roll. It covers the years from 1968 to 1990, and the action moves between the house of Max—a staunch communist and a member of the British Communist Party—in Cambridge and the apartment …
Snow: John Banville
Published by Faber Books, 2020, 352 pages. “‘The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’” This book begins like a traditional English whodunit: with a body in the library in a country house. It’s a cliché—except that John Banville doesn’t do clichés. He uses a murder mystery to paint a portrait …
A Madness of Sunshine: Nalini Singh
Published by Gollancz, 2020, 352 pages. “That was the town Anahera remembered, the town that had suffocated her, the town where there were no secrets—and far too many hidden things.” Anahera is from Golden Cove, a small town in New Zealand’s South Island. She left for the UK, became a well-known classical pianist and married …
The Selfless Act of Breathing: J.J. Bola
Published by Dialogue Books, 2021, 393 pages. “I quit my job, I am taking my life savings—$9,021—and when it runs out, I am going to kill myself.” Michael Kabongo is a schoolteacher in London. He is going through severe depression and feels alone, disconnected, and unable to confide in anyone, even his closest friends. London …
The Overstory: Richard Powers
Published by Vintage, 2018, 625 pages. “A man in the boreal north lies on his back on the cold ground at dawn. ... [T]he spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived …
The Promise: Damon Galgut
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2021, 304 pages. The Promise revolves around a white South African family—Manie and Rachel Swart and their children Astrid, Anton and Amor—and an unkept promise. Manie promises the dying Rachel that he will give their maid Salome the deeds to the house in which she lives. But once Rachel dies, …
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House: Cherie Jones
Published by Tinder Press / Headline / Little, Brown, 2021, 320 pages. This is a powerful, gut-wrenching book set on Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, the kind of place you see advertised in tourist brochures, with coconut trees, sand and blue seas. Cherie Jones’s novel looks behind this perfect façade, revealing the lives of the people—especially the …
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