Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Foreign by Sonora Jha

In that limbo An NRI is forced to face issues concerning herself and her country, issues she had turned her back on. Foreign works on two levels. It is about Katya (Katyayini) Misra acknowledging how she feels now she’s back in India after years away. She looks wincingly at the dismal situation in a small…

Book review: The Hunters by Chris Kuzneski

Good ol’ treasure hunt A crack team, a legendary treasure and a train named Ludmilla….This has all the ingredients for a rollicking potboiler. Chris Kuzneski seems done with the Payne and Jones series of thrillers for the time being. In his new thriller, The Hunters, he employs the familiar direct, forceful style of storytelling that has…

Book review: Three Ghost Story Books

Creepy tales A triad of mysteries, two of them with other-worldly beings, makes for a rewarding read. Jessica Faleiro’s Afterlife, is a collection of stories featuring Goan ghosts in Goan locales. The Fonseca clan gathers to celebrate Savio’s 75th birthday and, for some reason not really explained, one by one, they begin to tell of…

Book review: Gray Wolves by John Balian

Against all odds A roman á clef about triumphing in troubled times. Dr. John D Balian’s running-close-to-the-bone story is definitely a fable for our modern times, that perseverance, a refusal to give in to the most adverse circumstances will eventually lead one to one’s destination. Hanna/Jonah Ibelin, born to a poor Armenian farmer in Anatolia,…

Book review: Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Joy, despair, and a moral A modern retelling of an old fairy tale is also a compelling account of frontier life. The original version of this charming tale, by Eowyn Ivey, is titled Snegurochka and is in Russian. It is about an old couple who are visited by a fey creature of snow, a little girl…

Book review: When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied by Shinie Antony

A whole new spin on the old cliché: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Mira’s tale does not have the smoothest of starts, and the reader is more than a little startled to be set down bang in the middle of what appears to be a meltdown being suffered by the eponymous heroine….

Book review: Lessons in Forgetting by Anita Nair

Emotions at centrestage This is Nair’s fourth book and there is no doubt about one thing: she gets better with each one. Lessons… is a reflective, coming-to-terms sort of novel, in which the main protagonists — a former society wife who can wield a mean skillet and a professor of cyclone studies — keep doing…

Book review: Jesus by Deepak Chopra

The itinerant’s tale An easy reader on Christ’s early years. Deepak Chopra follows up his book on Buddha with this account of Jesus Christ’s unknown years. Not quite fiction not quite fact, Chopra’s Jesus wanders about known lands… Nazareth to Jerusalem to Galilee to Damascus. No, he doesn 217;t come to India, at least not…

Book review: Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers: Rethinking Subjectivity by Radha Chakravarty

Feminist voices An in-depth account of how six women writers view women vis-a-vis the world. There had to come a time when our post- colonial, post-Modern, post-feminist sisters would actually ask, “What is feminism?” That time, sadly, may be now. After the glorious age of Millett, Steinem, Friedan, Wolf and Co., the Movement continues to…

Book review: Paresh Maity`s Kerala Book

A radiant light An already lush landscape comes alive under the artistic gaze. Sometimes, one just has to deal in clichés to arrive at the inescapable truth. Here the cliché is a landscape artist taking a trip to the ultimate Eden. Art aficionados worldwide rejoiced at the result of a similar trip Maity made some…