[Reviewlet] The Beach at Galle Road, by Joanna Luloff
by Tyler McMahon
No expats hungry for exoticism here, Joanna Luloff’s debut collection brings the trials and triumphs of Sri Lankans during the civil war to the fore.
No expats hungry for exoticism here, Joanna Luloff’s debut collection brings the trials and triumphs of Sri Lankans during the civil war to the fore.
Shortlisted for the Booker, Tan’s novel pits Japanese atrocities in Malaya against an enduring love of their gardens.
In Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, The Newlyweds, a Bangladeshi woman finds that the dream of a better life in America carries risks, just not the ones she expects.
Does the lowly individual stand a chance against the blunt force of the mass? Anita Desai’s novella collection, The Artist of Disappearance, celebrates the wish to be left alone, and the raw agony of the desire to be seen.
V. Jo Hsu considers Rahul Mehta’s debut story collection, which she says addresses issues connected to sexual, racial, and cultural identities in artful ways, and through evocative language.
Lee Thomas talks with Aravind Adiga about neo-realism, myth, being a misfit, and winning the Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Adiga’s next book, a collection of stories called Between the Assassinations, will publish in the United States this June.
Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.
The White Tiger is 33-year-old Adiga’s first book, and one judge praised it as “the perfect novel.” Plot summary from BBC: “…a tale of two Indias…the story of Balram, the son of a rickshaw puller in the heartlands, one of the ‘faceless’ poor left behind by the country’s recent economic boom. It charts his journey from working in a teashop to entrepreneurial success.” You can read a sample chapter here and an interview with the author on the Booker Prize website. Congratulations to Aravind Adiga, and to the shortlisted runner-ups: Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), […]
In her debut novel, Preeta Samarasan tells the story of both one ethnic Indian family and the whole country of Malaysia, reminding us that History is the individual people it happens to.
