Min Jin Lee (https://www.minjinlee.com/) was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up in New York. In 2017 Lee released this novel , which is an epic historical tale following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. It is the […]
American novelist Christpher Bollen (http://www.christopherbollen.com/) writes psychologically probing fiction in the style of John Updike and Jeffrey Eugenides. His third novel is a swift moving thriller. The summary is as follows. Arriving on the Greek island of Patmos broke and humiliated, Ian Bledsoe is fleeing the emotional and financial fallout from his father’s death.
The reality of Winter in Scotland has been brought home in these early days of March 2018. Perhaps at home with a few hours to kill between blizzards, you could enjoy an appropriate piece of fiction by Bernard MacLaverty. This is Midwinter Break, and the summary is as follows. A retired couple, Gerry and
Life in a small market town like Lanark has its charms and frustrations. There you glimpse its fat cats and notice its small fry, its friendly locals and its entrenched conservatism. But what lies behind the faces of folk at the supermarket veg stall, the petrol station, at the leisure centre, at the Summer gala
This novel by Amitav Ghosh (https://amitavghosh.com/bio.html) charts the lives of Rajkumar Raha and his family, starting in Mandalay, where he finds himself stranded when the sampan he is working on breaks down. Rajkumar stays on as a restaurant worker, and witnesses the British depose and deport the last king of Burma, Thebaw, and his family,
You may remember Dante’s words “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” In Nicole Krauss’ (https://www.nicolekrauss.com/) fourth novel, two characters travel to Israel to confront the aridity of their lives. One is a powerful, 68-year-old Manhattan attorney and philanthropist named Jules Epstein. The
Fiction can take the reader into strange and surprising lives. Jenny Zhang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Zhang_(writer)) is a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a state school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (http://jenniferegan.com/about/), offers us this historical fiction set in New York in the first half of the 20th century. In this novel her focus moves from time to water, which is shown to have the power both to heal and to destroy. Anna Kerrigan, the novel’s
Jesmyn Ward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesmyn_Ward) won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her 2011 book ‘Salvage the Bones’. Her 2017 novel is Sing, Unburied, Sing describes a black woman and her two children driving to a prison to pick up their white father. We are introduced to the convict’s son, Jojo, who has been forced to shoulder
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