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 …
Category: Fiction
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 …
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin
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 …
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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