*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Sartaj Garewal’s energy couldn’t be more rousingly infectious as he voices the unforgettable characters in Adiga’s (The White Tiger) latest. Raised in a Mumbai slum by a fiercely demanding father, the two Kumar brothers are destined to become cricket champions by the sheer...
While Columbus is credited with discovering the Americas, notable scholars and historians have argued that Chinese explorers traveled around the world in the early 15th century and created a surviving map that shows America on its route. Imagine if those ancient explorers had stayed. The history of Asians...
'The Golden Legend' tells a magnificent story of terror and dignity I must confess: I missed my deadline. I simply didn’t want to finish this book. Letting go of Nargis, Lily, Helen, and Imran felt like a visceral cleaving. While Nadeem Aslam’s previous novels, including Maps...
In this debut novel (following Quarantine), western New York in 1985 and western India in 1998 are introduced as prologue, with both time and place connected by the 12-going-on-13-year-old and 26-year-old versions of Kiran Shah, whose coming-of-age as a bicultural gay Indian American is...
'Temporary People' depicts the lives of guest workers in the UAE The sense of displacement, of disconnect begins on the cover: The words “A Novel” written sideways, unobtrusively stamped along the left side under the title Temporary People, might be considered misleading. Made up of three...
Equal parts romance, fairy tale, horror, history, travelog, and treatise on the transformative power of storytelling, Indra Das’s debut combines a dual narrative about the developing relationship between two strangers with a fantastical tale set seemingly long ago. One December evening in Kolkata, Alok, a history...
'Olive Witch' is the memoir of an outsider on a quest for belonging “bow echo,” the very first words of Abeer Y. Hoque’s raw, unblinking, urgent-in-these-times memoir, Olive Witch, is an easy-to-miss clue. Followed by a temperature (73°F) and what looks like a diary entry, the...
*STARRED REVIEW "We are all migrants through time," observes Man Booker Prize short-lister Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The impulses driving such movement, especially when rooted in violent conflict, is at the core of Hamid's exceptional fourth novel. In an unnamed city (not unlike the author's native...
A young boy, curious about his “Ammi’s dot … a bright and pretty spot,” innocently asks, “Why do you wear that dot?/What’s so special about that spot?” His mother crouches to eye level so he can touch her forehead as she explains, “It’s not a...
The Recovered & The Unrestored Let me begin with a reader’s confession: Without a doubt, Shobha Rao’s debut, An Unrestored Woman, is the best short fiction collection I’ve read this year. These dozen stories are savage and empathetic, brutal and lyrical, mournful and celebratory as well. At...
*STARRED REVIEW When a bomb explodes in a Delhi market in May 1996, the 11- and 13-year-old Khurana brothers, who were sent to pick up the family's repaired television, are killed, while their friend Mansoor Ahmed, 12, somehow survives. The senseless tragedy inextricably binds the two...
Just after turning 8, Yasmin Kader set a goal "to read one book every day. Every single day, forever." She's already up to more than 400, thanks to after-school detours to Book Uncle's Lending Library, a street-corner pop-up made of planks piled high with books....
For the seriously literary, his name and work will be familiar. His short story, “Substitutes,” earned him an O. Henry Prize in 2009. Other short works have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Threepenny Review, Five Points, Fence, to name a few. He has a page...
In a tiny Indian village, Anil and Leena are constant childhood companions in spite of their vastly different backgrounds. Anil, a member of the farming community's most important family, is destined for a prestigious medical residency in Dallas. Leena, the only daughter of a modest...
'The Bones of Grace': Anam's ‘Bengal trilogy’ comes to a graceful close First, a warning: The Bones of Grace is the final installment in Bangladeshi-born, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam’s “Bengal trilogy.” If the trilogy’s publication history is any indication – A Golden Age in 2008, The Good...
*STARRED REVIEW Presenting her dozen stories in six interlinked pairs, Shobha Rao uses the savage 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as her narrative center, with reverberations moving outward beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations. A 13-year-old's would-be widowhood spent in a refugee camp is the best...
*STARRED REVIEW O. Henry Prize winner (2009) and first-time novelist Dinh drops four fictional characters into the tragic aftermath of the real-life January 2001 cataclysmic earthquake in Gujarat, India, as they travel from New York, London, and Delhi to attempt to save lives, including their own. The...
Spanning 17 titles over a quarter century, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has published books for every possible type of reader, including Grandma and the Great Gourd for the youngest, the three-volume Brotherhood of the Conch trilogy for middle grade/young adults, Black Candle for poetry lovers, Arranged Marriage for short story enthusiasts, and eight...
Award-winning writer Sarah Weeks (Pie; So B. It) and India-born debut author Gita Varadarajan present a poignant, comical cultural exchange in the alternating voices of two fifth-grade boys. Joe Sylvester has been living in the same New Jersey town, going to the same school and hanging...
