Top Reads

Someone at a Distance is a heartbreaking story of an ordinary upper middle class British family is so gripping. I have read no other work by Dorothy Whipple, so am not aware of her style of narrative. I enjoyed this from a literary point of view, but I found the book oddly regressive to feminism. Let me start with the plot, which, as the blurb shows, is ‘deceptively  simple’. The Norths are a happy, self-contained family…

It takes a truly talented mind to take the day to day life of a country house wife and convert it into a journal of light satire and human observation. It is a little wonder why The Diary of a Provincial Lady was a bestseller when it was published in 1933 and why the reprints are still so popular. To be honest, when I got through the first fifty pages or so, I wasn’t entirely…

In high school, I only read the Charles & Mary Lamb version of Shakespeare’s works. While it served as a good introduction to the essential plots and themes, it failed to capture the true beauty of the language. I never formally studied Shakespeare, and my only attempt at reading his original works was as a fourteen-year-old, grasping at dusty shelves to retrieve a heavy copy of The Complete Original Works of Shakespeare at my grandparents’…

I have loved reading ever since I can remember. As an introverted child and then an adult, reading provides a natural escape to alternate worlds. But it’s not just what’s on the pages, every excellent book is a puzzle looking to be solved. I am always in search or what’s between the lines, why the author made these plot choices, why the characters behave in a certain way and why write this story at all.…

I first learned about the Salem Witch trials when I read Robin Cook’s ‘Acceptable Risk‘ way back in 1998. I was immediately intrigued. What would drive intelligent educated people on witch-hunts? What was that hysteria that gripped Europe in the middle ages and the US as late as the 17th century? Arthur Miller’s critically acclaimed play The Crucible dramatizes the Salem Witch Trials and gives a glimpse of what may have happened. The Plot The…

Guest post by Kapil Sood, Writer-at-large, Shades of Words Often in our lives, we commit mistakes that leave us in overwhelming guilt. In the absence of a suiting redemption, we end up living our lives under the burden of this guilt. Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel The Kite Runner is about how this guilt and later a desperate attempt at redemption drives the life of Amir. With Afghanistan in turmoil as the background, it is a…