Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in US) suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It tries to be a fantasy-fiction novel, a police procedural, a London guide, a commentary on race all at the same time, but never quite succeeding. There is so much going on in every single page, that it was often hard to remember how I arrived at a particular point in the story and whether it was significant. The…
Culture
September is here, and we are heading towards the last quarter of this very strange year. I have never more adhered to the ‘one-day-at-a-time’ philosophy as I have in the last six months. And there appears to be no end in sight. The only upside (and I use that word extremely cautiously, as the world is literally dying from COVID), is that all this staying at home is forced us to lean into habits and…
Thomas Cromwell Finds A Sympathetic Portrayal in ‘Wolf Hall’ In Wolf Hall, Mantel takes us back in history when Henry VIII was shaking the very foundation of the Church in his bid to marry Anne Boleyn. Fun times, huh? Historians and storytellers have already written much about one of the most reformative and turbulent periods of the Tudor rule that it is challenging for a writer to leave their own mark and bring some freshness…
‘Planet of the Apes’ is often considered to be one of the top films of all time and with good reason. Plot Summary The plot, in brief, is that somewhere in our distant future, a spaceship with three passengers lands on an unknown planet. The human inhabitants of this planet are not as sophisticated as their distant genealogical cousins from the spaceship: on this world, the apes have evolved to be the more intelligent race,…
Le Carrè’s brooding spy thriller is slow in execution but big in substance. At a few hundred pages it’s a quick read with a plot engaging in its simplicity. Plot Summary Alec Leamas is an aging British intelligence officer who has recently led the Berlin division during the height of the cold war. His network has slowly collapsed over time because of one person — Mundt, the leader of East Germany’s intelligence operations. The novel opens with…
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning is literally setting the world ablaze with its rave reviews. The praise is so universal that I hesitated a bit before opening its pages. What if it did not live up to the hype, or worse, what if it mishandled the geopolitics that dominate today’s India? I need not have worried. Through the stories of Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir, Majumdar weaves an intricate human drama that touches on a myriad…
I often approach contemporary writers with some trepidation, much like Margaret Lea, the narrator of The Thirteenth Tale. I need not have worried, because this gothic tale hooks and reels you in as you open its first pages. It was November – Diane Setterfield The book’s opening sentence is simple and yet it contains the promise of a dark, grim ghost story. For in the end, this is what The Thirteenth Tale is; a ghost…
The latest novel by Ann Patchett is an intimate character study of a brother and sister, abandoned by their parents and their fate often tested by life. One day the Conroy siblings find themselves motherless, as Elena Conroy leaves them for a higher calling without ever bothering to say goodbye. This abandonment by their mother, and her picking the needs of strangers over her own kids, leaves a permanent bruise. And it all started with…
