2023 - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus. Penguin Books. This delightful book is actually a fierce feminist manifesto masquerading as a heartwarming domestic life story. The basketful of prizes it has won – Best Debut Fiction of 2022, Goodreads Choice Best Debut Novel Award, NYT No 1 bestseller, Book of the Year for The Times, Sunday…

Book review: Night Train by Martin Amis

NIGHT TRAIN by Martin Amis. Vintage UK Books. At first, the story seems a straight send-up of American police stories. The narrator here is a policewoman who goes by the name of Mike Hoolihan; quite apart from the masculine-sounding moniker, she has the voice and the general build of a man, so gets frequently mistaken…

Column: Deadlines and a Couple of Cappuccinos, Please

Coffeeshop chronicles: How WFC works for some, not all Soon after WFH became the ante-Covid and post-Covid norm, WFC — Working from Cafes — got its moment in the sun. WFC always had its devotees who had been quietly slipping into the nearest café, there to set up their notebooks, laptops and smartphones, order a…

Book review: The Woman Who Climbed Trees

The Woman Who Climbed Trees In this sprawling multi-generational saga of a family based in Nepal, it is Meena the child-bride who is clearly the protagonist. Smriti Ravindra deftly combines the personal with the political in her debut novel; the main concern of this book, however, is women, and the love, loss and pain they…

Book review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS by Pip Williams. This was my Book Club`s pick for the month, and it turned out to be a most interesting story, as well as yet another sweet father-daughter story, that of young Esme whose father worked at Oxford on the OED. From the time Esme was a young girl,…

Book review: The Bellboy by Anees Salim

THE BELLBOY by Anees Salim. Penguin Hamish Hamilton Books. Anees Salim sets such a measured pace in unspooling the life and times of Latif the teenager, who is the bellboy of the book`s title, that the reader may well wonder where the author is going with this. That would be the regular reader; those familiar…

Book review: The Blue Women by Anukrti Upadhyay

Compartmentalised lives Anukrti Upadhyay is back with a fresh cache of short stories that effectively proves her earlier acclaimed work Kintsugi was no flash in the pan. There are a dozen short stories in this volume, all of them imbued with the characteristic quietude we have come to associate with this writer. When things —…

Column: Love makes the world go round? Says who?

Love makes the world go round? Says who? So here`s the thing. Despite the edgy love stories Malayalam cinema regularly puts out (anyone seen Mammooty`s Peranbu, where he settles down with a transwoman at the end?), despite the love songs our singers soulfully sing, the truth is that many people in Kerala are stuck in…

Book review: Not Quite a Disaster After All

Belonging and unbelonging Buku Sarkar`s intriguingly titled book Not Quite a Disaster After All traces the life path of a Bengali girl named Anjali from her childhood spent in a Kolkata manor to the NYC neighbourhood which eventually becomes home to her, some years later. The trail switches from an upper crust lifestyle to a…

Book review: What the Rains Foretold by N. Mohanan

When the past finally catches up Mohanan`s story What the Rains Foretold (Innalathe Mazha) is a retelling of a popular Kerala folklore, which involves the growth trajectory of a young Brahmin man named Vararuchi who turns his back on the position of king`s Royal Pundit and all the comfort that entails, to head off into…