Published by Penguin / Viking, 2009, 256 pages.Review by Joannah Caborn Wengler This book describes the first two years that a young girl, Eilis, from Ireland spends in Brooklyn when she emigrates to the US in the 1950s. On the face of it, it ought to be a rollicking ride: with a sudden departure, a …
Category: Fiction
The Garden of Evening Mists: Tan Twan Eng
Published by Canongate Canons, 2012, 352 pages.Review by Rishad Patell The Garden of Evening Mists is the story of Yun Ling Teoh, a survivor of a Japanese POW camp in Malaya during World War 2. Now a lawyer, Yun Ling returns to the hills of the Cameron Highlands to fulfil her dead sister’s dream of …
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter: Malcolm Mackay
Published by Mantle / Pan, 2013, 256 pages. A gangster book with a difference. We follow a professional hitman, Calum MacLean, as he figures out how he is going to kill Lewis Winter, a smalltime drug dealer who has become a thorn in the side of a powerful criminal gang. The book is set in …
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Re-reading ‘The Birds’
Review by Usha RamanThe Birds and Other Stories published by Virago Press. The story was first published in 1952. Courtesy: http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=505 I picked up a back issue of Zoetrope All Story, a magazine launched by Francis Ford Coppola last week, and, leafing through it, came across a stark full page illustration to the story that …
Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome: Jérôme Ferrari
Review by Lesley O’Dowd Published by Actes Sud, 2013, 208 pages. Over-intellectual, abstract… I sighed when I heard the Prix Goncourt 2012 had gone to a novel about student philosophers who decide to run a bar in Corsica--and that the bar will meet the fate of Rome falling to the barbarians in 430, as commented …
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The Book of Chameleons: Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn Published by Simon & Schuster, 2008, 180 pages. “Truth has a habit of being ambiguous... If it were exact, it wouldn’t be human.” This is my first book of the reading challenge and what a wonderful way to begin! A whimsical, lyrical story about truth and memory. The book …
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Life after Life: Kate Atkinson
Published by Bond Street Books / Penguin, 2013, 624 pages. This book seems to have made it to pretty much every list of the best books of 2013. The premise is interesting: if you could live your life over and over again until you got it right, would you actually get it right? The main …
Fall of Giants and Winter of the World
Give me Herman Wouk any day. Now I definitely want to reread "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance". --Kamakshi
The Casual Vacancy: J.K. Rowlings
Published by Little, Brown, 2012, 512 pages. This is about as far as you can get from the magical world of Harry Potter. There are no Dumbledores or Hagrids here, much less any wizardry. The book takes you to a small unmagical town (Pagford), with small self-absorbed people who lack empathy or wisdom. Depite this, …
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Review by Kamakshi BalasubramaniamPublished by Atlantic Books, 2008, 304 pages. Terse and lyrical, Galloway’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo shows with deep poignancy how war shortens lives but expands to the point of unbearable pain each moment lived in anticipation of tragedy. A man’s life consists of fetching drinking water daily for his family …
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