In three loosely connected stories, The Elephanta Suite features Western travellers who are disturbed and bewildered by their encounters with the “real” India. Their preconceived and somewhat romanticised ideas about the country are overturned once they come face to face with over-crowded streets, beggars, noise and bureaucracy. Instead of an exotic land of spirituality, yoga, […]
Environmental campaigners and ego-tripping capitalists clash in Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood. It sounded promising but it’s largely a promise unfulfilled. Birnam Wood — the portable forest that heralds the fall of Macbeth — is the name of an “activist collective” based in Christchurch, New Zealand. They’re guerrilla gardeners in essence; taking over waste public land […]
What kind of a person would deliberately set fire to a tinder-dry plantation, causing ten deaths and the destruction of houses and thousands of acres of farmland? In The Arsonist, Chloe’Hooper sets out to answer that question through an account of the investigation into a fire in the Australian state of Victoria on 7 February […]
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day is a wonderfully comic novel about a governess whose fortunes are transformed because of a mistake
My attempt to read more of the books already on my shelves came unstuck spectacularly in August. Until then I’d been chipping away at the TBR and exercising restraint over purchases of any new books. The prospect of ending the year at least 10% down on the previous year seemed doable.. But it’s now highly […]