Published by Harvill Secker / Vintage, 2018, 304 pages. Native Americans, or Indians, were the first settlers in North America. But when colonizers from Europe came, they not only took away the Native Americans' lands and livelihoods but rewrote their narratives. There There is Tommy Orange’s way of reclaiming the narrative of the Native Americans …
Category: Fiction
A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towles
Published by Hutchinson / Harvill, 2017, 512 pages. “If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.” In 1922, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by the Bolsheviks for being an aristocrat. The Count’s home at the …
Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
Published by Hachette / Head of Zeus / Apollo, 2017, 560 pages. “History has failed us, but no matter.” Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan, a group of immigrants about whom not a lot has been written in fiction. The book starts in a little fishing village in Korea. Hoonie, a man with a …
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese
Published by Vintage, 2009, 560 pages. This is a rich story, interweaving the lives of people working at a clinic in Addis Ababa run by a Christian mission (known as the Missing Clinic by the local people and everyone else) with the history of Ethiopia from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Sister Mary Joseph …
Judas: Amos Oz
Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de LangePublished by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2016, 288 pages. “Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of …
The Cure for Death by Lightning: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Published by Houghton Mifflin / Virago, 1996, 304 pages. “The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I …
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Macbeth: Jo Nesbo
Translated from Norwegian by Don BartlettPublished by Hogarth, 2018, 624 pages. Original version published in 2018. A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate. This …
Written in Black: K.H. Lim
Published by Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd., 2015, 240 pages. Jonathan is a 10-year-old boy in Brunei. He lives with his father and brother Aaron and sister Jen. His mother has gone away, ostensibly for health reasons, and his older brother Michael left to join a rock band. When the book starts, Jonathan’s uncle, Ah Peh, …
Warlight: Michael Ondaatje
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / Vintage, 2019, 289 pages.Review by Usha Raman “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.”“We order our lives with barely held stories” Memory is a strange thing; it reveals the ephemeral nature of experience and the power of its reconstruction. It builds …
Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami
Translated from Japanese by Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage, 2005, 505 pages. Original version published in 2002. A man talks to cats, fish and leeches rain down from the sky, a man dressed like Johnny Walker (of whisky fame) is making a flute from cats’ souls, and a stone opens the door to another world. Welcome …
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