Broken Country Book Review: A Beautiful Story That Needed More Emotional Depth What happens when the person you once loved returns after you have built an entirely different life? Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall begins with that familiar question, then leads it somewhere darker. The Dorset countryside of the 1950s and 1960s provides the Read more…
A Man by Keiichiro Hirano: Can We Ever Escape Who We Were? What would you do if you discovered that the person you loved had died under someone else’s name? Would the life you shared become a lie, or would your memories remain untouched by the deception? That unsettling question opens A Man by Keiichiro Read more…
Shantaram Book Review: A Beautiful, Flawed Search for Freedom Some books tell you a story and quietly step away. Others move into your head, rearrange the furniture, and continue talking long after you have closed them. Shantaram belongs firmly to the second category. It is sprawling, dramatic, philosophical, tender, violent, and sometimes frustratingly pleased with Read more…
Ananya discovered Raghav Mehra’s secret because neither of them had found time for lunch. It happened on the final Wednesday of the month, when half the office was racing to complete its targets and the other half was pretending not to watch the clock. At twenty minutes past seven, Ananya finally sent the report she Read more…
The Bee Sting Review: A Family Falling Apart One Secret at a Time Some books keep you turning the pages because of the story. Others keep you turning them because you can’t stop thinking about the people inside it. The Bee Sting keeps you reading for a different reason. You want to understand why these Read more…
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats Book Review: A Story That Quietly Finds Its Way Into Your Heart I almost made the mistake of judging this book too early. The first few chapters didn’t completely pull me in, and for a while I wondered whether I’d built it up too much in my head. That can Read more…
The Eighth Life Book Review: A Story That Somehow Makes a Century Feel Personal I finished The Eighth Life (For Brilka) a few days ago, and I still haven’t entirely figured out how I feel about it. That may sound like an odd way to start a review, but it also feels like the most Read more…
No One Is Talking About This Book Review There is a temptation, when talking about No One Is Talking About This, to call it a novel about social media and leave it at that. The book certainly invites that description. Its protagonist spends much of her life online. She scrolls endlessly, follows arguments she barely Read more…
Time Shelter Book Review: What Happens When Entire Nations Become Trapped in Nostalgia? Some novels are easy to describe. You can summarize the plot in a few sentences and give readers a fairly accurate idea of what to expect. As a book, Time Shelter is not one of those novels. On the surface, it begins Read more…
Come and Get It Book Review: Kiley Reid Writes the Kind of Social Discomfort That Lingers I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen while reading Come and Get It. A betrayal. A confrontation. Some huge emotional explosion that would finally release all the tension the novel quietly builds from page to page. It never Read more…
