Tag: book-review

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Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

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Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her previous novels Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998), set in India of her childhood- born in Delhi, The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize.  This tale is about Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, whose once-wealthy families connected through their grandparents, are part of the first generation of young Indians to experience migration, travel and life outside a rigid hierarchy, caught in between tradition and modernity, between pleasing parents and pleasing themselves. They fall in love, but are soon parted by self-doubt, pride … Continue reading Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

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Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

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A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London, While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. She becomes his captive, holed up in a swanky apartment for total control of her body and severed from the outside world, in exchange for any material possession she desires. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death. She aborted the treacherous game … Continue reading Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

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Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

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A young girl, starving and covered with blood, turns up in a general store in a remote village deep in New Zealand. She blurts out her name- Anya – but refuses to say anyting else. A shocking murder in the New Zealand bush and the witness who looks all too familiar draws a woman back to the very place she swore she’d never return to in this breakneck debut thriller. The phone rings for Effie, a police officer who fled that very village under terrifying circumstances 17 years earlier and is now in Scotland. An old friend, Lewis, is on … Continue reading Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

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What tech nerds got up to…

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Seven worried people have gathered for dinner in Notting Hill, London, but it’s the first time six of them have seen one another since 1999, when they spent a heady, intense summer building a website that was meant to revolutionize online dating by making matches based on psychological testing. They presence in Notting Hill to celenrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999. For them it was an unsettling experience, as they lived and worked on a remote countryside estate. Their boss was obsessive and opaque. Following a raucous night in which … Continue reading What tech nerds got up to…

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Marriage, love, betrayal, infidelity

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Roberta Green, a graduate student on the master of fine arts programme at the fictitious Edward University in upstate New York is presenting a searing thesis project about two married professors tiptoeing towards infidelity, as their transgressions are brought to light in Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian. The facts she is presenting pertain to the romantic lives of two of her tutors: a married couple named Simone and Ethan both in their early forties. Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, … Continue reading Marriage, love, betrayal, infidelity

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Workplace romance virtually

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Moderation by Elaine Castillo is the real romance in the virtual workplace, a story about the possible future of live. Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places after getting a promotion. Now thanks to the parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground- the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider- she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed moderating the next stage of human interaction. In another … Continue reading Workplace romance virtually

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“I believe that life is not damnation but grace”

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In Misery of Love a spiritual seuquel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and other Imaginary Creatures, Yavan Alabé continues his unflinching interrogation of race and family in modern France. Colonial history haunts this stunning spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. Alabé focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, blonde, slight, willful- faces her estranged father as her family comes together to bury her grandparents   One of earlier stories suggests there was a double suicide.  Alagbé seamlessly glides between narratives of the family’s past and present, all haunted by the legacy … Continue reading “I believe that life is not damnation but grace”

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Self-immolation in the realms of imagination, work and play

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Thirty-three-old Singapore-born Jemimah Wei’s debut novel The Original Daughter, is a gripping tale of two sisters- one adopted- long separated by acts of cruelty and the inability to forgive. Set in Singapore and New Zealand, Wei’s story reflects the practice, probably old but discussed with less stigma these days, of going no-contact when close relationships feel too painful, too broken to fix.  Wei illuminates both the need for, and the cost of estrangement. As a character says after suffering a loss, “How various our excuses, as we flail about in our attempts to avoid facing the shame of wanting love”. Singapore, … Continue reading Self-immolation in the realms of imagination, work and play

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Constant struggle to find daily necessities

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In 1966, China is on the cusp of a decade of upheaval, and the furnaces of Old Kiln have never been this cold. The village’s once-famed ceramics production has almost ground to a halt. Only ancient grudges smoulder beneath its poverty-stricken streets, never forgotten by the two families that preside over the village making them “backward, simple, petty, absurd and cruel” Jia writes. Between them stands the adopted Inkcap, whose mysterious origins leave him unloved and barely tolerated. Historically they have always been told what to do, and they have had the inertia of people trained in passivity. “Everyone is … Continue reading Constant struggle to find daily necessities

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Dreaming of a fragile future and misfortunes of a teen Naples bandit

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So People Know It’s Me, set in the winter of 1991, is a unforgettable novel which unleashes Zeno’s luminous, unguarded and defiant voice- dreaming of a fragile future, set in the juvenile prison island of Nisida. Zeno is fifteen years old, a minor by law, but he grew up long ago in the dusty heat of Naples.  The novel follows one man’s self-realisation in a foreboding juvenile prison. Winding down cobbled streets on his motorbike, he delivers baggies and picks pockets, doing whatever it takes to put food on the table and steal a few precious moments of freedom with his … Continue reading Dreaming of a fragile future and misfortunes of a teen Naples bandit