Published by Vintage, 2014, 528 pages. Review by Usha Raman I picked up Neel Mukherjee's novel with much anticipation...well, perhaps it is wrong to use the term "picked up" because it was the first book I had downloaded on my Kindle Paperwhite and it may be more correct to say, "I swiped on to page …
Category: Fiction
How to be both…a creative not-quite conundrum
How to be Both: Ali SmithPublished by Hamish Hamilton, 2014, 384 pages. Review by Usha Raman The cover is deceptively like a book for young adults, a simple coming of age tale—two teenage girls from some time in the 1970s, walking on a street somewhere (possibly) in Paris. Ali Smith's novel, shortlisted for last year's …
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S.: JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst
Published by Hachette Book Press, 2013, 456 pages. If you think of a book as words on a page, think again. S. is a novel with a difference, stretching the limits of what a book can be. You pull it out of a black slipcase with a paper seal that you have to break—a hardcover …
Half of a Yellow Sun: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published by Fourth Estate, 2006, 448 pages.Review by Imran Ali Khan It took me a while to get to this book but when I finally did it consumed me. It kept me up all night and haunted me well after I was done with it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun …
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The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt
Published by Abacus, 2013, 880 pages.Review by Karen Moir The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a captivating 800 page chronicle of the life of Theodore Decker. It begins when a young boy is rocked by suicide bomb in Metropolitan Museum of Art that takes his mother’s life and replaces her with a yearning for the …
The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken: Tarquin Hall
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2012, 341 pages. How can anyone resist this title? I would have bought this book even if I hadn’t already known this series of detective novels set in Delhi. The book’s main character is Vish Puri, India’s Most Private Investigator, who is often helped—against his wishes—by his mother (the formidable …
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An Andamans Story
The Last Wave—An Island Novel: Pankaj SekhsariaPublished by HarperCollins, 2014, 304 pages.Review by Usha Raman I had the pleasure this last week of engaging in conversation with Pankaj Sekhsaria, author of the new release, The Last Wave: An Island Novel (HarperCollins, 2014). The conversation was part of the Hyderabad launch of the book, a story …
The Book of Night Women: Marlon James
Published by Riverhead Books, 2009, 415 pages. A haunting, brutal story about slavery in Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, The Book of Night Women tells the story of Lilith, and of Montpelier, the plantation she grows up on. The story is told in Patois, from Lilith’s point of view. This is …
The Lowland: Jhumpa Lahiri
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, 339 pages.Review by Rishad Patell This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a powerful and riveting story. Set in Calcutta post independence, the book is the story of two brothers through the complex and tumultuous period of the birth of the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. The two brothers, …
The File on H: Ismail Kadare
Translated from Jusuf Vrioni's French translation by David Bellos.Published by Arcade Publishing, 1998, 192 pages. Original version in Albanian published in 1981. Two naïve Irish-American scholars travel to Albania in the early 1930s in search of the origins of epic poetry—in particular, of Homer’s epics. And the only place where oral epic poetry still exists …
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