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 …
The Devil and the Dark Water: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books, 2020, 576 pages. 1634. A ship, the Saardam, is about to set sail from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam. The ship is carrying a secret cargo that only very few know about. On board are the ambitious Governor General of Batavia, Jan Haan; his wife Sara Wessel and …
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The Baltimore Boys: Joël Dicker
Translated from French by Alison AndersonPublished by MacLehose Press, 2017, 448 pages. Original version published in 2015. Marcus Goldman is a successful writer who has moved to Florida to write his next book. But he is haunted by his past: his point of reference is a “tragedy”, and he measures time from the event. Ever …
The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson
Published by Penguin, 1939, 208 pages. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for …
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The Anarchy—The Relentless Rise of the East India Company: William Dalrymple
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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Girl in White Cotton/Burnt Sugar: Avni Doshi
Published by Fourth Estate India / Penguin, 2019, 240 pages. Note: This book was published as Girl in White Cotton in India and under the title of Burnt Sugar elsewhere. Caregiving in the best of circumstances is a fraught business. One that is made more so when it involves a relationship that is itself threadbare, …
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Best books of 2020
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash The year 2020 is coming to a close, finally. And what a year it has been! For weeks on end we stayed confined to our homes, unable to lead normal lives, listening to grim news of the pandemic. But throughout all this, books have opened a door to other …
Actress: Anne Enright
Published by Jonathan Cape, 2020, 272 pages. How do you cope with being the daughter of a famous actress? What does it mean to live with someone for whom performing is not just something she does on stage? Norah’s mother is Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish stage and screen actress. Katherine was a single mother, …
Beyond the Seasons—Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Review by Usha RamanPublished by Penguin / Anchor Books My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through …
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The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLeanPublished by MacLehose Press / Riverhead Books, 2018, 508 pages. Original version published in 2015. "There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places… they are places that are not within the …
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