Tag: book review

“The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga

I didn’t like this book when I started it. Even when I was browsing it in the bookshop, I wasn’t that keen – I only bought it because it was half-price and it had won the Booker Prize. Surprising, then,…
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“The Writer as Migrant” by Ha Jin

These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul. In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual…
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“Fire Horses” by Mark Liam Piggott

Joe Noone seems to have it all – a beautiful house built into a Mallorca hillside, a comfortable lifestyle, a beautiful girlfriend. Yet it’s New Year’s Eve 2007 and as fireworks go off around him and people celebrate, he seems…
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“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd

I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…
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“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon

There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908; another is the struggle of the narrator, Bosnian immigrant Brik, to adapt to life…
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“Thoughts” by Giacomo Leopardi

The book was unfinished in Leopardi's lifetime, and perhaps the finished version would have been brilliant. This sequence of half-formed thoughts and bon mots, however, was just a quick and not particularly satisfying read.
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