Published by WH Allen, 2020, 480 pages. From 2005 to 2020, Lionel Barber had what he called “the best job in the world”: editor of the London Financial Times. This is Barber’s account of those years and his close encounters with the great and the not-so-great (or good!). As editor of a major newspaper, Barber …
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Published by Bloomsbury Circus, 2021, 352 pages. Sonia Faleiro’s new book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, investigates the death of two young girls in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh. The book offers Faleiro, an accomplished journalist, an opportunity to spend four years following up on a hot-button news story. It lets her, and her readers, to look …
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Published by Penguin, 1994, 311 pages. “The story I am going to tell comes from a place deep inside of myself, a place that perceives all that I have irremediably lost and, perhaps, what gain there is behind the loss. If people forget their past as a way to survive, other people remember it for …
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 576 pages. William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire is a chronicle of greed, ambition, and the machinations that put a vast geographical territory under the East India Company (EIC). The book’s epigraph offers a succinct summary of the book’s central theme: “Corporations …
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Translated from German by Jane BillinghurstPublished by Greystone Books, 2016, 288 pages. Original version published in 2015. One day, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, stumbles across what he thinks are mossy stones but turn out to be old wood. But not just old wood, which would normally decompose, but the roots of a tree that no …
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Harvill Secker, 2009, 200 pages. Original version published in 2006. José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal. The village has a charter that dates back to the thirteenth century, “but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes …
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019, 224 pages.Review by Mohan Raj A longer version of this review was originally published in The Book Review, Vol XLIV, No. 2-3, Feb-Mar 2020. Reproduced with the permission of The Book Review Literary Trust. Displacement──within and across countries──of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is …
Published by Women Unlimited, 2019, 250 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian Originally published in The Book Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 8, August 2020. Reprinted with permission from The Book Review Literary Trust. Vasanth Kannabiran’s latest book, described in this edition’s back cover as "a feminist memoir", is a great deal more. There are at least three …
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Published by Penguin / Apollo, 2004, 832 pages. “Let me tell you what I wish I’d known / When I was young and dreamed of glory / You have no control: / Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” These lines are from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, which was inspired by this biography. The …
Published by Profile Books, 2015, 352 pages. On 23 April 1944, a group of British operatives in Crete captured the German General, Heinrich Kreipe, from under the noses of 100,000 German troops, search planes prowling the mountains, and patrol boats checking the shore. Without a shot being fired, the General—a survivor of the Great War …
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