Published by Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd., 2015, 240 pages. Jonathan is a 10-year-old boy in Brunei. He lives with his father and brother Aaron and sister Jen. His mother has gone away, ostensibly for health reasons, and his older brother Michael left to join a rock band. When the book starts, Jonathan’s uncle, Ah Peh, …
Warlight: Michael Ondaatje
Published by Alfred A. Knopf / Vintage, 2019, 289 pages.Review by Usha Raman “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.”“We order our lives with barely held stories” Memory is a strange thing; it reveals the ephemeral nature of experience and the power of its reconstruction. It builds …
Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami
Translated from Japanese by Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage, 2005, 505 pages. Original version published in 2002. A man talks to cats, fish and leeches rain down from the sky, a man dressed like Johnny Walker (of whisky fame) is making a flute from cats’ souls, and a stone opens the door to another world. Welcome …
Frida Folk: Gaby Franger
Review by Sadhana Ramchander Book translated from German by Gita WolfPublished by Tara Books, 2018, 192 pages. Original version published in 2018. Frida Folk celebrates, in an unusual manner, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her many ‘avatars’. This is indeed a fascinating book! It documents an unbelievable variety of interpretations of Frida—the woman and …
Exit West: Mohsin Hamid
Published by Hamish Hamilton / Penguin, 2017, 240 pages. A man and a woman meet in a city in what is probably Syria and fall in love. Civil war is initially just a distant presence in their lives. But then it all starts to fall apart, and strange doors start opening up, leading out of …
Best books of 2018
My request for the best books you read this year had an overwhelming response! Thank you to those of you who sent in their lists. The lists below not only cover a wide range of subjects, but also span centuries, from 2018 to those published hundreds of years ago. Fiction includes fantasy, crime and …
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, 544 pages. Stuart Turton takes the traditional English setting for a whodunit—a country house thrumming with secrets, tensions and fears—and turns it into something completely unexpected. I have read a lot of crime fiction, and this is one of the most original books I’ve come across. Take …
Continue reading The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: Stuart Turton
Einstein’s Dreams: Alan Lightman
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing / Vintage, 1992, 192 pages. What if time flowed in a different way from the one we know and we are used to? What if it circled in on itself, so we relived our lives endlessly without ever knowing it? What if it moved in fits and starts? What if you …
Hag-Seed: Magaret Atwood
Published by Hogarth Press, 2016, 320 pages. Margaret Atwood never disappoints, and this reworking of The Tempest (as part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press) is no exception. Felix, the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival in Canada, has been working on what he believes is his masterpiece, an over-the-top production of The Tempest. …
Lincoln in the Bardo: George Saunders
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, 368 pages. While the American Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln lost his 11-year-old son, Willie to typhoid. It is said that for a few nights after Willie’s death, Lincoln, grief-stricken, used to go to the crypt to hold his son’s body. George Saunders takes this sliver of history and …
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