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 …
Category: Fiction
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 …
Continue reading Our Lady of the Nile: Scholastique Mukasonga
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 …
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 …
The Blackhouse: Peter May
Published by Quercus Publishing / Silver Oak, 2011, 528 pages. Peter May has written an atmospheric and intricately plotted novel set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The Blackhouse is a police procedural and a story about a man forced to come to terms with his past. Fin McLeod is …
Firmin—The Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife: Sam Savage
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 240 pages. “I had imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line.” These are the words of a voracious reader, a hopeless romantic in love with Ginger Rogers—and a rat. Firmin is born in the basement of Pembroke Books, a …
Continue reading Firmin—The Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife: Sam Savage
The Girl on the Train: Paula Hawkins
Published by Doubleday / Thorndike / Black Swan, 2015, 416 pages. Rachel takes the train to and from London, like any other commuter. The train always stops at the same signal, opposite a house with a young couple. She is fascinated by them, this perfect couple, whom she calls Jess and Jason (who are, in …
A Little Life: Hanya Yanagihara
Published by Random House / Picador, 2016, 832 pages. This beautiful book was described to me as both the ‘gay novel of the decade’ and ‘a story of 4 men and their journey through life’, descriptions that I found both confusing and frustrating the deeper I got into the story. To me, the story of …
Dear Life: Alice Munro
Published by Douglas Gibbons Books / Vintage, 2012, 336 pages. Review by Thomas Peak and Susanne Gjonnes Why do we read? To think, to experience and most of all to feel. Perhaps. Munroe’s final collection of short stories Dear Life achieves all of this in abundance. With characteristic subtleness, a refined and homely style, the …
Talking About Books 