How Many Countries Does The Indus Cross by Akhil Katyal My rating: 5 of 5 stars Sitting dumbfounded after having read this whole book in one go. Such a conundrum. Should I take bite-sized morsels and leave some for later? Or ask for the avalanche? The avalanche. Always the drowning. Always the surrender. As…
Tag: book review
Book Review: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann My rating: 5 of 5 stars How do you write about a book like this? Wait. Let me take a breath. Then a step back. Then another. We begin again. When I read Hanya Yanagihara’s, “A Little Life”, I scarcely believed, I would find another book that moved…
Book Review: Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg
Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg My rating: 4 of 5 stars A lover told me to read this. A lover just like Anne. Sophisticated. Unattainable. Impossibly beautiful. I desisted for a while. Months. Read it, she said. “Read it. You’re all over it.” Now I have read it and I understand why this book…
Book Review: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (spoiler alert)
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Every woman is the architect of her own fortune.” – says the miniaturist in a mysterious note. How true. For I designed myself to read this book, take it into my home and heart, only to feel utterly let down. Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist…
Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller
Circe by Madeline Miller My rating: 5 of 5 stars It is been a long time since I got through a book so quickly. It took me a day. It’s impossible to keep away from this book once you’ve begun it. Madeline Miller is incredible in the way that she spins a yarn. Circe takes…
Book Review: The Great Stink by Clare Clark
The Great Stink by Clare Clark My rating: 5 of 5 stars “In the rotting and inadequate sewers, human excrement mixed with refuse from the slaughterhouses and knacker’s yards and waste from the tanneries and factories. Every day it drained into the Thames. it was not long before the river itself became the great cesspool…
Book Review: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert My rating: 5 of 5 stars Quite honestly I don’t know how you could give this book a rating of anything less than five stars. It is a classic and deservedly so. For there are very few books that can match the intricacy and insight into human behaviour as the…
Book Review: The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan
The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Of course this is fiction. Of course it is. Keep reminding yourself because it’s easy to forget in the thick of Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow. A fictional account of the life of the Brontë sisters this book is so many…
Book Review: Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery
Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery My rating: 4 of 5 stars Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a tough act to follow, but I think she almost manages to do just that with this one. Terrifically reminiscent of the other book, the story takes place in the same building, and there is a…
Book Review: An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor My rating: 4 of 5 stars “When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.” This ain’t never happening in India. In this utterly brilliant book,…