In this novella by the Man Booker-shortlisted novelist, David Szalay, we get a dozen of loosely connected stories about people who are mostly strangers, crisscrossing through the world. In each chapter, its protagonist meets the person who will be central to the next story set in a whole new location, until it comes to a […]
The Woman in the Purple Skirt, recently translated from Japanese, is one of the more memorable psychological novels I have read in a while. In it, the narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, is always watching the titular Woman in the Purple Skirt. At first, I didn’t see anything unseemingly about this since the […]
This is another solid collection by the British Library Crime Classics series – this time featuring stories with animals! The creatures in these stories are sometimes instrumental to the committing of the crime, and on others, they provide evidence to find out the two-legged guilty parties! The anthology begins with a story by Arthur Conan […]
This novel reminded me so much of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Quite like Eleanor, Gilda, the protagonist of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, is an eccentric. Gilda, a recently laid-off twenty-something bookseller, suffers from severe anxiety and is obsessed with death after being traumatized as a child by the passing of […]
Yoga Pant Nation, the third book in the Class Mom series (which can be read as a standalone), is a quick read. The story revolves around Jen Dixon, the fifty-four-year-old mom of the ten-year-old Max and two daughters in their thirties. Jen’s life is a juggling act. She is the class mom in Max’s Elementary […]
Dealing with domestic abuse and sexual trauma, Something Wild isn’t an easy read, although I’m glad I did. The story begins with Tanya and Nessa Bloom returning to their childhood home in the Boston suburbs for a weekend to help with their newly unemployed mother Lorraine’s move. Their stepfather, Jesse, has recently inherited a small […]
Even though she has been divorced for over a decade, Liz, the protagonist of Her Turn is still angry at Sidney, her ex-husband for his affair that led to their divorce. Sidney has since married Nicole, his mistress, and the couple lives in Seattle now, whereas Liz has moved to Washington DC. Liz has a […]
This is an odd little book! The unnamed protagonist in Intimacies has recently moved to The Hague from New York after her father’s passing and her mother’s return to Singapore. The narrator has been a cosmopolitan all her life, living all around the world, but it has also left her somewhat adrift. Now she wants […]
This is going to be a short review as I’m not sure where I stand with this book. Although The Bone Code can be read as a standalone, it is the twentieth book in the Temperance (Tempe) Brennan series. This is the series that inspired the TV show Bones, which is how I became interested in it. The Bone […]
The Chianti Flask is a peculiar addition to the British Library Crime Classics series as it is mostly a love story set on top of a mystery. 🙂 The story begins with a trial where Laura Dousland, a young woman in her twenties, is being tried for the murder of her husband Fordish, who was […]
This is a must-read if you are a fan of John Boyn’s A Ladder to the Sky! Honestly, I was a bit apprehensive about The Plot at first – A Ladder to the Sky was my favorite read in 2020, and similar to it, The Plot is about plagiarism in the literary world, exploring the […]
The Damage is a visceral story of the aftermath of rape. On one fateful night, Nick, a twenty-year-old college boy, goes out drinking with his flatmate to work up the courage to let go of his unrequited love. At the bar, Nick meets Josh, a handsome and charming man to whom Nick is instantly attracted. […]
The Startup Wife, which calls attention to the gender imbalance and sexism in the tech world, is another one of the recently published novels with a plausible plot. Asha Ray, daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, is pursuing her PhD at Columbia when she reconnects with Cyrus Jones, her high school crush, and marries him after dating […]
This book started out strong, so much so that it reminded me of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, my favorite Booker Prize winner. Both novels, set in India, are rags to riches stories featuring poor, low-caste protagonists who realize they too must play dirty if they want to get a leg up in a corrupt […]
I’m not sure which genre The Boys’ Club would fall under – is it a thriller or a literary fiction? Unfortunately enough, whatever the genre it may belong to, this #MeToo story set in the corporate law world felt very plausible. Alex Vogel is a recent graduate from Harvard Law who has just joined Klasko […]
