Published by SFWP, 2025, 251 pages “My wedding dress was made by a costume designer I met while buying weed at the 7-Eleven one February, which is also where I met Jimbo, my husband to be. I went to the 7-Eleven every day. I liked standing around the counter, drinking coffee and talking to Plots, …
Tag: Fiction
Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia: edited by Evelyn Flores and Emelihter Kihleng
Published by University of Hawai'i Press, 2019, 358 pages “The work remains of breaking down myths and building up re-visioned ones that empower rather than demean. It remains to tell new stories that are really ancient ones, persisting in our blood, paradoxically and endearingly both familiar and breathtakingly novel, stories that deconstruct the lies and …
What We Can Know: Ian McEwan
Published by Jonathan Cape, 2025, 301 pages The United Kingdom, 2119. Tom Metcalfe, an academic, studies the 1990s to the 2030s, a period he romanticizes. Looking back, this was a time of plenty: when you could go into a supermarket and buy anything you wanted, walk for miles on dry ground, and be surrounded by …
The Eleventh Hour: Salman Rushdie
Published by Jonathan Cape London / Random House, 2025, 254 pages This is Salman Rushdie’s latest book, a collection of three longish stories bookended by two short ones. Given the attack on him that almost killed him and the fact that he is now 78, it is not surprising that many of the stories deal …
The Book of Records: Madeleine Thien
Published by Granta Books / W.W. Norton & Company, 2025, 368 pages “The only way to really remember is to forget everything and let time fill the story up. To reach it through a different doorway. Things have to inhabit the living or else disappear from the world and cease to exist. If things survive …
The Republic of Dreams: Nélida Piñon
Translated from Portuguese by Helen LanePublished by Picador / Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, 663 pages. Original version published in 1984. This multigenerational story set mostly in Brazil is centred around Madruga, a Galician who leaves Spain in the early 20th century for the new world in the hope of making his fortune. When the book …
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin
Published by Vintage, 2022, 482 pagesReview by Usha Raman and Suroor Alikhan This is the story of a friendship—one that survives betrayals and tragedies. Two 11-year-olds meet in a paediatric hospital. Sam Masur is there after a horrific accident has smashed his foot, leaving him traumatized and refusing to speak. Sadie Green is there because …
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame: Victor Hugo
Translated from French by Walter J. CobbPublished by Penguin, 1964 (this translation), 501 pages. Original version published in 1831. What makes a monster? Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, is physically deformed: he has a humpback, a protrusion on his chest, and only one eye because the other is covered by a wart. As …
The Road to the Country: Chigozie Obioma
Published by Hutchinson Heinemann / Penguin, 2024, 358 pages “The story of a war can only be fully and truly told by both the living and the dead.”—Igbo proverb Kunle is nine years old when he sends Tunde, his younger brother, out of the house, so that he can be alone with Nkechi. Tunde runs …
Poonachi, or the Story of a Black Goat: Perumal Murugan
Translated from Tamil by N. Kalyan RamanPublished by Eka (Westland Books), 2018, 173 pages. Original version published in 2017. “Once, in a village, there was a goat. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary life never leaves a trace, does it?” Near a village in Tamil Nadu, an old man …
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