book review Archives - Andrew Blackman

Reading

Race & Class in Jamaican Fiction: Dog-Heart by Diana McCaulay

Dog-Heart tells the story of two Jamaicans from very different worlds. Sahara is a light-skinned “uptown” woman who runs a successful Kingston restaurant. Dexter is a poor, dark-skinned boy from the “ghetto” neighbourhood of Jacob’s Pen.

Reading

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

How can human relationships be formed without shared memories? Can mathematical order overcome the chaos of a life without memory? Yoko Ogawa's novel explores these fascinating themes through the simple story of a professor and his housekeeper.

Reading

Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde

Vagabonds! is a startlingly original Nigerian debut novel that introduces us to a compelling cast of marginalised characters struggling to survive and thrive on the chaotic streets of Lagos.

Reading

Lote by Shola van Reinhold #ReadIndies

Lote, a debut novel by Shola van Reinhold, is an intelligent, beautifully written piece of literary fiction that explores issues of art, beauty, race, sexuality and more.

Reading

Pick of the Crop by Nailah Folami Imoja

The annual calypso competition is a big deal in Barbados, so when I saw a novel about it on a recent trip to a second-hand bookshop, I wanted to give it a try. It has a promising start, but the…

Reading

Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami

Ms Ice Sandwich is a beautiful and endearing novella about a young boy's innocent crush on a grocery-store clerk.

Reading

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire is an Australian crime novel that throws the crime-writing conventions out of the window. It's more about male violence and sexual aggression than about solving the murder with which it starts.

Reading

The American Way: Stories of Invasion

This new short story collection by Comma Press focuses on what the American Way looks like to those at the sharp end of US aggression around the world.

Reading

Digging to America by Anne Tyler: Review

In Digging to America, Tyler charts the course of two mismatched families, the hale and hearty, all-American Donaldsons and the quieter, more reticent Iranian-American Yazdans. All they have in common is that they both adopted babies from Korea at the…