Eleanor Oliphant is Completely FineGail Honeyman2017Harper Collinspp. 383 Oh my! This Book! The author chronicles the story of Eleanor, a young woman, a social misfit, a victim of past trauma that has led to present distress. Like most people who are psychologically disturbed, Eleanor partly knows that something is amiss, but also like most people,…
The Twentieth WifeIndu Sundaresan2002Harper Collinspp. 374 The twentieth wife covers the story of Nurjahan’s marriage to Salim. Somewhere in between is the story of deceit and strained father and son relationships, of Akbar and Salim and Salim and his sons. The hunger for power in almost all the men in the story is barely tolerable….
Ibnebatuti (Hindi) Divya Prakash Dubey 2020 Hind Yugm pp. 160 Ibnebatuti is a story of revolving around a mother son relationship. Like all of Dubey’s writings, this is contemporary, it is new age, and it is very refreshing. I picked up this book with a lot of expectations and it did not disappoint. The subtle…
Sphinx Robin Cook 1979 Signet pp. 320 This book came as a total surprise. I was so amazed by the first fifty pages that I checked the main plot online several times to see if I was reading some fake copy of the book. Goes to show how much I have categorised Cook’s writing in…
Toxin Robin Cook 1998 PanMacmillan pp. 437 Written in the late nineties, the book covers the important issue of food related diseases. Cook describes, in great detail, the process of preparing patties for hamburgers. The description of preparing ground meat and the way animals are taken and treated in slaughter houses is quite gory. It is…
Funny Boy Shyam Selvadurai 1994 Penguin pp. 316 Funny Boy is the story of a young boy who comes to terms with his personal and social context as he matures into adolescence. The novels revolves around his childhood and adolescence in Sri Lanka. Set in the context of civil war during the 1980s, the story…
Har Kahaani Kuch Kehti Hai (Hindi) Avdhesh Joshi 2020 Notion Press pp. 122 The book is a collection of short stories that revolve around young adult concerns of love, career and friendship. The stories are set in tier two and tier three settings of India. The language is simple and suits the characters that form…
The Lively Library and An Unlikely Romance Niranjan Navalgund 2016 Readomania pp. 96 The Lively Library… is a novella that uses animism to create a narrative of books coming to life. A young man inherits a library and sets it up despite his wishes to the contrary. He and other library members are unaware that…
Identity Milan Kundera 1998 Faber pp. 160 My first reading of Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) was not very appealing. I was probably not prepared for it or did not have the leisure to engage with it in the way it was meant to be read. I was quite sure I wouldn’t pick up…
Before the Coffee Gets Cold Toshikazu Kawaguchi (trans. Geoffrey Trousselot) 2015/ 2019 Picador pp. 224 I chanced upon this book while looking for books by Japanese authors. Admittedly, it is the name of the book that caught my attention. Coffee and book together make a strong combination and I thought this must be written by…
