Tag: fiction
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Book Review – Jaded by Ela Lee
On paper, Jade has it all: a successful law career, the daughter who has made her parents proud, a great boyfriend from an affluent family, and a small but solid circle of girlfriends. Then one work night out throws everything into a downward spiral as she wakes up with no idea how she got home,…
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Book Review – Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days. It’s 1964 in wintry New England, and Eileen does not have it good. Living in a run-down house with her alcoholic father – a bully she mostly despises but remains dutiful too – Eileen is a young woman who drapes and drowns herself in…
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Book Review – Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton
Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton is a dynamic and compulsive multigenerational story that moves back and forth in time and place, between mother Sook-Yin and daughter Lily, between Hong Kong and London, spanning four decades from the 1960s to 1990s. It’s a story of love and betrayal; of the struggles of dual-heritage identity; of…
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Book Review – Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah
When Efe and Sam meet in 1990s London, Efe is burdened by the expectations of her parents, who sent her to London from Ghana in hopes of a better future, while Sam is consumed by his studies in pursuit of a career in law. They come and go from each other, in ebbs and flows,…
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Book Review – The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is a beautiful and captivating novel about love and loss, identity and displacement, devastation and renewal. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, the story spans several points in time across almost half a century, taking us from war-torn Cyprus of the 1970’s to London of the late 2010s.…
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Book Review – Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Fight Night by Miriam Toews is an exuberant and compelling story about three generations of women, living together in a house in Toronto which is loud, chaotic and full of cursing but, at its heart, brimming with love. Our nine-year-old narrator Swiv lives with pregnant Mom and elderly Grandma. When Swiv is expelled from school…
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Book Review – A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion
When 12-year-old Ellen Gallagher and her mother get into a heated argument on the drive home one night, along a dark and desolate road, a snap decision made by the mother is to have consequences that will reverberate, through their own family and their little community, for the rest of that summer. A Crooked Tree…
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Book Review – The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903 – 1991) was first published in English in 1960, having been translated from Yiddish. In the author’s note of my copy, Singer thanks his editors who ‘for years have encouraged me in the difficult task of introducing Yiddish writing to the American reader’. I found this…
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Book Review – Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin
All we have is ourselves. All we have is family. Dinner Party: A Tragedy, the debut novel by journalist, author and playwright Sarah Gilmartin, is a novel which is honest with us, and warns us from the beginning that we are going to be taken on a bumpy ride. It tells the story of a…
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Too Many Books, Too Little Time
I started this blog largely as a space to write about one of my main passions: books. However, although they are one of the main things that bring me joy, I decided against categorising this blog as a book blog; I wanted to leave myself the space and flexibility to post about the many things…
The Resting Willow 