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 …
Continue reading The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter: Malcolm Mackay
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 …
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 …
Continue reading Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome: Jérôme Ferrari
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 …
Continue reading The Book of Chameleons: Jose Eduardo Agualusa
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 …
Give me Herman Wouk any day. Now I definitely want to reread "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance". --Kamakshi
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, …
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 …
The Story of Beautiful Girl: Rachel Simon Review by Usha RamanPublished by Random House, 2011, 252 pages. One of the things about travel is that it affords the opportunity to read—especially when one is on a plane without a personal video screen and movies on demand! A couple of weeks ago on one such flight …
Review by Joannah CabornPublished by Penguin, 2012, 367 pages One of the best things about this book are the dedications. The first one:“To quietly flowing Don”. The second is a Gogol quote, from Dead Souls (1842):“We live in new times – the age of the hero is past – now is the time of the …
Continue reading Various Pets Alive and Dead: Marina Lewycka
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