Published by Jonathan Cape, 2020, 272 pages. How do you cope with being the daughter of a famous actress? What does it mean to live with someone for whom performing is not just something she does on stage? Norah’s mother is Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish stage and screen actress. Katherine was a single mother, …
Category: Fiction
Beyond the Seasons—Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Review by Usha RamanPublished by Penguin / Anchor Books My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through …
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The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLeanPublished by MacLehose Press / Riverhead Books, 2018, 508 pages. Original version published in 2015. "There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places… they are places that are not within the …
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All the Beautiful Liars: Sylvia Petter
Published by Lightning Books, 2021, 320 pages. “Memories? They’re the bits you feel and the bits you’re told, and they all come together in your mind as sound bytes and snapshots. Some you lose, and some become part of someone else’s memories. Some bits just disappear, and you end up looking for them for the …
Piranesi: Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 272 pages. “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens once every eight years.” This is how the book begins. The narrator lives in a vast labyrinth of halls filled …
Disobedience: Naomi Alderman
Published by Penguin / Touchstone, 2006, 288 pages. In London, a beloved Rabbi addresses his congregation in spite of his failing health. The Rav’s voice has lost some of its resonance but the people do not want to believe that he is dying, “he from whom the light of Torah seemed to shine so brightly …
The Moor’s Account: Laila Lalami
Published by Random House / Pantheon / Periscope / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014, 336 pages. History is written by the victors, as the saying goes. What we know of the conquest—or the invasion—of the Americas tends to come from those who conquered the land. This book gives another perspective—the narrator, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, …
Oscar and Lucinda: Peter Carey
Published by Everyman / Faber & Faber, 1998, 544 pages. A glassworks factory bought on a whim, and a trip to the other end of the world made on the toss of a coin: chance is the driver of most of the major events in this book. Oscar and Lucinda is a strange love story …
Indian women tell their stories
The Inner Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women, edited by Lakshmi HolmströmPublished by Rupa & Company, 1992, 228 pages.In Other Words: New Writing by Indian Women, selected by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu MenonPublished by T.H.E. Women's Press Ltd. / South Asia Books, 1995, 196 pages. “Women in India have traditionally been tellers of tales. They have …
10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World: Elif Shafak
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 320 pages. Tequila Leila, the prostitute, is dead. She has been murdered and her body dumped in a wheelie bin in Istanbul. She realizes “with a sinking feeling that her heart had just stopped beating, and her breathing had abruptly ceased, and whichever way she looked at her situation there …
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