Slippery Substances: A Review of V S Naipaul’s Half a Life Half a life is set firstly in post-independence India, at the politically protected court of the Maharaja, later in London, then in the pre-independence Africa in a nameless country…
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
Soup for the Spirits: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Soup for the Spirits: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is a Tale for a person such as me; is a Tale that pleads for all of us to be Makers, in our beliefs for there really is…
A review of Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection
In the tentative groping of the characters for meaning, the articulation of silence, Grenville creates a story which is a pleasure to read. Reviewed by Magdalena Ball Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most accessible writers. She has her own…
A review of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin “Two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.” (484) Mathematical reality…
A review of Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift
Gabriel’s Gift follows a few months in the life of Gabriel Bunch, a fifteen year old North London schoolboy in search of his muse. Gabriel’s parents have recently split up, and his father, once the bass player for 70s rock…
Anne Tyler, a Nineteenth Century Contemporary
Tyler has brought exceptional skill and variety to an unaccustomed area of literary activity, the world of the best-seller. Her combination of popularity and quality recalls the great novelists of another century. Erudite guest reviewer Bob Williams looks at Tyler’s…
A review of Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles
A boy is raised in the land of despots, where the “curried curses of dispossessed property owners” is not necessary to explode into murderous excess. Between his abusive and tyrannical parents, and the abusive and tyrannical dictator Idi Amin, who…
A review of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers
In 1857, Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley decides to take his boat, the Sincerity, on a little jaunt from the Isle of Mann, to Maldon. Perhaps he wasn’t really selling salted Herring. However, his little voyage turns into something entirely different,…
A review of Elizabeth Routen’s Voices on the Stair: Collected Stories
There are stories about war, about those who just don’t fit into society, about the US South, and the dissolution of marriage, of life, its limitations and occasional tender beauty. There are unattractive waitresses, fat men, poseurs, blind men, mothers,…
A review of David Malouf’s Dream Stuff
A missing father, a missing uncle, a missing place. David Malouf’s latest book of short stories, Dream Stuff is about longing and nostalgia. A desire to reach across the bridge of time, back to some place which may have never…