Teatime for the Firefly is the debut novel by Shona Patel. It is set in the Assam Tea Gardens in India during the 1940’s, just before India’s independence. This is a wonderful novel that transported me to Assam the entire time. (It helps to drink a good cup of Assam tea while reading)! Patel’s parents were Assam tea planters, and although this is not their story, she drew on personal experience to evoke the rich atmosphere of colonial society and…
The Bone Season is the debut novel by Samantha Shannon, the first in a projected series of seven novels. Shannon imagines a whole new world, set in the not too distant future, where clairvoyants are considered unnaturals and held in prisons in London. Underground crime syndicates have formed with mime-lords who have all categories of clairvoyants working for them. In this world we meet Paige Mahoney, the heroine of The Bone Season. Shannon has created a new language full of…
Bertie Plays the Blues is a novel by Alexander McCall Smith, one of his 44 Scotland Street novels set in Edinburgh. I’m more familiar with The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, but with his usual charm and wit, this novel was a pure joy to read. It is amazing to me how McCall Smith can create so many wonderful characters and write about them over and over in a way that doesn’t get boring. The novel is funny and…
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser started out very promising. I was drawn in right away by her writing style. However, I never really cared about any of the characters. The only one I cared about was the dog, and we never even learned his name. There were mysteries unfolding throughout the book that never got resolved, and I was left feeling hugely frustrated. De Kretser is a Sri Lankan author living in Australia. I loved her descriptions of…
The Radiance of Tomorrow is a novel by Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. In this book, he writes of life in Sierra Leone after the civil war. A few village Elders, and others who have managed to survive the war, slowly return to what is left of their hometown of Imperi, to try to rebuild a life for themselves. They are met by obstacles every step of the way, the worst of…
And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass, author of Three Junes, brings back characters we first met in her earlier books. Here we read about Kit Noonan, a father in his early 40’s at a crossroads in his life. Having just lost his job, and struggling with his marriage, his wife forces him to look for his unknown father, believing that you can never really know who you are if you dont know where you came from. This sets…
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is the debut novel by Rhonda Riley. It is the story of Evelyn, a young girl alone on a farm in rural North Carolina during WWII who finds what she thinks is a wounded soldier on her land. She quickly discovers that this is no soldier, and with a remarkable ability to recover, she is not sure who, or what, it is. Thus begins the story of Adam Hope. With a complete suspension of…
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine is a novel about Aaliya, a reclusive Beiruti woman in her seventies whose life revolves around her books and the translations that she does in her small apartment. Nothing much happens in this novel, yet we are privileged to see the inner workings of Aaliya’s mind, her thoughts at this late stage in her life, as she moves back and forth through time reliving memories of past days. There are moments of wisdom and…
The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi. I’ve mentioned before in this blog that I’m not a big fan of short stories, however this collection is well worth reading. Though the stories are not related, as a whole they paint a picture of the immigrant experience of Nigerian women in America. Adichi’s writing is brilliant, and seemingly effortless; every story pulled me in and I cared for each of the characters in…
The Gravity of Birds is the debut novel by Tracy Guzeman. Guzeman writes about the Kessler sisters, Alice and Natalie, whose lives change forever the summer they are 14 and 17 years old and meet 28 year old painter Thomas Bayber who later becomes very famous and reclusive. Bayber paints a portrait of the sisters that summer, that he only shows to two art collectors when he is 70 years old. He asks that the sisters be found before the…