Title: The Good Immigrant Author: edited by Nikesh Shukla Publisher: Unbound Published: 2016 Genre: Non Fiction The blurb reads: ‘What’s it like to live in a country that doesn’t trust you and doesn’t want you unless you win an olympic gold medal or a national baking competition’. The Good Immigrant is a collection of essays…
Title: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows Author: Balli Kaur Jaswal Publisher: HarperCollins Published: 2017 Genre: Fiction Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is, as the title states, just that. The stories told by a group of Punjabi women are not only central to the book, but expose the themes around arranged marriages, elements of patriarchy in…
Title: HOME FIRE Author: Kamila Shamsie Publisher: Bloomsbury Published: 2017 Genre: Fiction Kamila Shamsie’s book is a tale of two families’ lives in this retelling of the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles (which I had to educate myself about when I started reading this book). From the very beginning of the book you get the sense…
Title: An American Marriage Author: Tayari Jones Publisher: Oneworld Published: 2018 Genre: Fiction Tayari Jones has written a love story that is tender and heart breaking in equal measure. Celestial and Roy are your average educated, upper middle-class, upwardly mobile professionals. They are barely past their first year as newly weds when Roy is arrested…
I have always thought that the first book I’d read by Gabriel García Márquez would be One Hundred Years of Solitude. To be honest One Hundred Years intimidates me. This is the tome to Magic Realism, a genre I am not particularly partial to, but which I will read in smaller volumes. One Hundred Years…
Title: The Lover Author: Marguerite Duras Genre: Memoir Published: First published in 1986 I am reading Modern Classics this month. As if my reading ambitions were already not lofty enough, along with #reading SA, #reading Africa, now there is this goal. This was more of an assigned reading on a writing class I am taking.…
Half of a Yellow Sun is about the Biafra war of the late 1960s. A war that was fought between Nigeria and the newly formed Biafra Republic following its secession from Nigeria. The book provides a clear backdrop of the history of the war, and brings with it a clear explanation to some of the…
I had just finished Petina Gappah’s first novel, The Book of Memory when I got an invitation to the launch of her recently published collection of short stories – Rotten Row, which follows from her first collection, An Elegy for Easterly, published in 2009. Suddenly I am all about this author. At the book launch her self-deprecating…
I am still trying to get the right vocabulary on how best to describe Hanya Yanagihara’s 724-page tome on struggle. Not a struggle of the political kind, but a life filled with unrelenting sorrow. I cried in the beginning, in the middle, at the end, and everywhere in between. At one point my husband just…
Homegoing is a work of fiction about a family history that spans two continents, the North America and Africa. It is the story of half sisters: Effia and Esi whose lives take on very disparate paths. Effia is married off to a white British slave trader and lives a comfortable life at “the Castle” –…