*STARRED REVIEW Tania Rodrigues and Kamila Shamsie prove themselves the best of audiobook companions with their fifth memorable pairing. Rodrigues, “with roots in India, Portugal and Britain,” according to her website bio, is an ideally cosmopolitan choice to follow two teens who come of age in...
In 1947, as Britain withdrew from India, it left in its wake a trail of vicious slaughter. British Iranian debut novelist Melody Razak introduces the (mostly) Brahmin residents of Delhi’s Pushp Vihar – “the House of Flowers” – whose lives become the tragic microcosm of...
Indian-born, English-raised Homer Todiwala undoubtedly improves British Pakistani Taymour Soomro’s evocative debut, in which father and son take turns navigating a relationship conflicted by power and clashing identities. At 16, Fahad is expected to learn to “take responsibility” for the family estate in rural Pakistan....
*STARRED REVIEW Sarayu (just Sara at her English university) has a scholarship so tight that she dreams of telling her benefactor how “an extra hundred pounds would make not the tiniest difference to his life but would transform [hers].” She finds comfort – not to mention...
Indian-born British actor Zenia Starr returns to narrate the second volume of Sangu Mandanna’s Hindu mythology-inspired series, featuring now 12-year-old Kiki whose artistic prowess can engender whole worlds. To read both titles in order (Kiki debuted in Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom), of course, is...
*STARRED REVIEW Amit Chaudhuri – novelist, poet, essayist, musician – dexterously expands the quotidian into philosophical, sociopolitical, and existential ruminations in Sojourn, a sparse narrative with undeniably dense resonance. An unnamed Indian writer arrives in Berlin for a four-month university residency. He's befriended, then abandoned, by a...
British actor Seema Bowri makes her narrating debut, her crisp, youthful voice an ideal match for 11-year-old Tamarind, a Bristol, England-raised girl meeting her late mother’s family for the first time. Her father, recently remarried and on his way to his honeymoon, arranges to leave...
Monica Ali: 'I need to write. No Matter What' Monica Ali’s debut novel, Brick Lane, earned a Man Booker shortlist nod and recognition for Ali as one of Granta's 2003 "Best Young British Novelists." Born to a Bangladeshi father and British mother, Ali was raised in England,...
Even at 400-plus pages, by book's end, readers will miss the Ghorami and Sangster clans of Monica Ali's addictively readable, shrewdly insightful, subversively humorous novel Love Marriage. Yasmin Ghorami and Joe Sangster are in love, engaged to be married in the months ahead. They're both physicians,...
Dhaka-born, Harvard PhD-ed, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam has won prestigious accolades for her Bengal trilogy into which she’s lyrically woven Bangladeshi history with personal inspiration. She turns utterly contemporary in her newest novel, which reads rather like an elevated, fictional version of Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley...
China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...
Nikita Lalwani's alternating narrators in her remarkable third novel, You People, seemingly have little in common beyond a shared place of employment: a London pizzeria with predominantly undocumented staff. Nia, a 19-year-old Welsh transplant escaping an abusive home life, was asked to leave Oxford University, where...
With echoes of themes in his internationally lauded Never Let Me Go (2005) – that life can be manufactured, bartered, bought – Booker-ed, Nobel-ed, and knighted Kazuo Ishiguro presents a bittersweet fable about the human heart as “[s]omething that makes each of us special and...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, when the father was a young boy – the same age as his young son now – he wanted to be a crossing guard. After that, he wanted to be a writer. “‘And now you are one!’” the son gleefully...
The delightfully adventurous Jasmine Green series makes its Stateside debut with the adorable A Piglet Called Truffle. Spirited Jasmine is a veritable animal expert thanks to her farmer father, her veterinarian mother, and all the inhabitants (including, ahem, her two siblings) that thrive on the...
Life in India’s basti (slums) has rules all its own – about toilets, water, hierarchies, privileges. The police either ignore the inhabitants, making crime reporting meaningless, or threaten to raze their ramshackle homes. Meanwhile, some 180 children go missing in India every day, reports British-based...
Growing up in the Philippines, Candy Gourlay (Tall Story) "wondered why all the books she'd ever loved didn't resemble her steamy, tropical home in Manila." As she explains in her author bio, it took years as a journalist and author for Gourlay, who now lives...
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi “That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie,” one character admonishes another in Susan Choi’s fifth (and finest) novel. Returning to the multilayered teacher-student power struggles that were seared into My Education (2013), Trust Exercise immediately puts...
Sita Kaur Shergill is dying of cancer. She has “had enough of this ghastly life,” but before she goes, she leaves epistolary final wishes that her three British-born daughters journey together to India “on [her] behalf.” Her detailed itinerary is exacting, from serving others to...
*STARRED REVIEW Yes, reading the inimitable Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel Lecture is easy, but the better option is listening to his crisp, gentle voice instead. Perhaps Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, missed the memo on properly pronouncing Ishiguro's first name, but her introduction...
