Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

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…

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 —…

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…

Book review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Down Hampi way Salman Rushdie the story-teller, is back with a — to quickly borrow a term made famous recently by Deepika Padukone — banger of a book, Victory City. The story details the rise and fall of Bisnaga (Vijayanagara), as narrated by its creator-midwife Pampa Kampana, the woman who Will Not Age. It`s a…

Book review: Table for One by Sumaa Tekur

TABLE FOR ONE by Sumaa Tekur. Hay House. The tagline for this book reads: a solo living manual for the curious Indian woman. As manuals go, it is direct, (very) helpful and packed with information a woman about to live solo could parse to her benefit. The one outstanding quality of Tekur`s writing is her…

Book review: Bangalore Blues by Kirtana Kumar

BANGALORE BLUES by Kirtana Kumar. Little Jasmine Press. So, this delightful book is in a category of its own: it`s an IFYYK book. There are 32 short stories (and one poem) in here, along with a very moving essay, and all of them are guaranteed to strike a chord with ye olde Bangalorean (YOB). By…