Anees Salim - Comfortably Numb

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 Odd Book of Baby Names by Anees Salim

A bleak kind of hope Anees Salim`s new book is laced with equal amounts of melancholia and quirk, with the former gaining a slight edge over the latter, which will not surprise the writer`s fans one bit. The plot hinges on a slender story, that of an erstwhile ruler lying in a comatose state in…

Book review: Writing the City, edited by Stuti Khanna

Depicted as experienced This slim volume contains literary essays that artfully entwine the perfectly compatible strands of travel and personal memoir to good effect. A list of known names write about the cities they have situated their works in, the cities of their imagination versus the reality, the cities that strike a creative chord in…

Book review: The Small-town Sea by Anees Salim

This boy’s life An account of a young life lived on a cliff overlooking an ever-changeable sea. Anees Salim remarked in an interview that the success of each book was making it harder for him to write the next book. Well, it is also getting harder for the reviewer assigned to critique his…

Book review: The Blind Lady`s Descendants by Anees Salim

The bungalow of tales The Blind Lady’s Descendants. The title of Anees Salim’s book has a Márquez-like ring to it; what’s more, the story plays out very like a Márquez tale, slowly reeling the reader in and soon getting her/him thoroughly invested and involved in the fraught family drama being played out on the…