The Travelling Cat Chronicles Book Review: A Journey That Stays With You Cats have a way of making themselves indispensable without appearing to try. They claim the most comfortable corner of the sofa, demand food at inconvenient hours, and behave as though sharing a home with us is a favor they’re doing us. Then, somewhere Read more…
The Reading List Book Review: Finding Company Between the Pages There is something personal about recommending a favorite book. You hand over a title and hope another person will find something of what you found there. Sometimes, the conversation afterward tells you more about that person than an evening of polite questions ever could. Sara Read more…
The Chola Tigers Book Review: An Absorbing Adventure with Some Missed Opportunities Someshwar is a wealthy merchant. In the opening of The Chola Tigers: Avengers of Somnath, however, his money cannot buy the one thing he asks for: the survival of the temple. His family has already been killed. Then the Shiva Linga is shattered, Read more…
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans Review: What Her Letters Leave Unsaid Sybil Van Antwerp can tell an author exactly what she thinks of a book. She can send a brisk note to a friend and offer advice to a boy who needs someone to listen. Ask her what is happening to her eyesight, though, and Read more…
Yellowface Book Review: Fame, Theft and the Stories We Claim How far would you go to become the writer you always believed you deserved to be? In Yellowface, R. F. Kuang takes that uncomfortable question and pushes it until ambition curdles into something uglier. The result is a sharp, compulsively readable novel about envy, authorship Read more…
Before the Coffee Gets Cold Review: Can the Past Still Change Us? What would you do if you could revisit one moment from your past? Would you seek an explanation, confess a hidden feeling, or say the goodbye you never had? Toshikazu Kawaguchi explores these questions in a quiet Tokyo café where time travel comes Read more…
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry review: Finding family between the shelves Some novels announce their intentions with a dramatic opening. Others slip quietly into your life and make themselves at home. Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry belongs to the latter kind. It begins with an irritable bookseller on a Read more…
Few people spend years learning how to save lives only to find themselves confronting the limits of their own. Paul Kalanithi did. At 36, when his long and demanding neurosurgical training was nearly complete, doctors discovered stage IV lung cancer in his body. The future he had worked towards suddenly became uncertain. This When Breath Read more…
Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Review: Grief, Belonging and One Very Clever Octopus An elderly cleaner and a captive octopus hardly sound like the likeliest pair around which to build a novel. Yet that unusual friendship is precisely what gives Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt its charm. What begins as a gently eccentric story Read more…
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Review: Where Community Becomes an Act of Resistance Some novels introduce a community. Others invite you to live inside one, listening to its arguments, absorbing its secrets and gradually learning who will show up when someone needs help. James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store belongs firmly to Read more…
