About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Nicola Dinan
Rave Asian Review of Books A keenly observed and unflinching examination of that journey and its emotional, social and physical consequences, both for the individual and the people close to them ... The main narrative focuses on the couple’s struggles for self-knowledge and self-actualization. Between the anxiety and exhilaration of first love and first steps into the wider world, author Dinan packs in a wealth of insights. She combines this with an enviable ability to perfectly capture a particular feeling, complex or psychological process in a few short sentences.
Mirinae Lee
Positive Asian Review of Books Telling stories is an important theme in the novel. They can be a source of solace ... Through the character of Mrs Mook, Lee presents compelling stories which deserve to be heard.
Dorothy Tse, trans. by Natascha Bruce
Rave Asian Review of Books A shimmering, fairy-tale city of glass towers where nothing is quite as it seems ... Hard to categorize exactly but there are parallels with the works of magical realism writers, especially Angela Carter. Tse uses many common tropes of that genre such as mirrors, magicians, clowns and other reality-twisting devices ... Fact is equally as important as fiction for Tse as she tends to keep the magical quality of her narrative anchored in realism ... The reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that there’s more than a grain of truth in this fantastical story.
Jokha Alharthi, trans. by Marilyn Booth
Rave The Asian Review of Books ... lyrical ... Unlike a conventional family saga with a chronological timeline, author Alharthi chooses to blend the stories of the three generations. Sometimes the scene changes seem random; at other times they are prompted by Zuhour’s thoughts or dreams. This lends the novel an air of magical realism as well as playing into one of its major themes: how the actions and experiences of previous generations affect their successors ... These stories of the elders, so beautifully imbued with elements of Oman’s landscape and culture, present as myths, allowing Alharthi to demonstrate her literary flair and ponder the qualities of their composite parts, namely language ... What can challenge the terrible power of language? Alharthi shows that desire—an emotion so intense that it cannot be put into words—is a strong contender ... Like its title, the novel ends on a bittersweet tone. Its tragic heroes are all the more memorable for it.
Perumal Murugan, tr. Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Positive The Asian Review of Books A novel with a title like Pyre is unlikely to have a happy ending. Nevertheless, the journey towards this inevitable outcome delivers a disturbing insight into human bigotry and brutality whose application extends far beyond the novel’s treatment of inter-caste marriage in contemporary Tamil Nadu ... The translation from the original Tamil relies on simple English and the occasional American idiom yet comprehensively captures the claustrophobic atmosphere in which the lovers exist.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Rave Asian Review of Books \"By turns brilliant, erotic and piercing, this third novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi shines new light into how historical oppression, both at a personal and societal level, continues to dominate our present-day thinking. Ostensibly a dissection of an exploitative relationship, the novel quickly broadens into a wide-ranging examination—and skewering—of master narratives around race, gender, sexuality and religion which dictate the way we live now ... Van der Vliet Oloomi reflects the co-existence of pain and pleasure in lush descriptions of the southern Spanish landscape which simultaneously evoke its post-Reconquista history of Jewish and Muslim suppression. \
Kia Abdullah
Positive The Asian Review of Books ... intelligent ... At times a little too sensational to be wholly credible, the legal drama is enough to keep the pages turning. Used as a device to criticize modern prejudices, however, it becomes enthralling ... Only a clever twist could resolve such an emotionally charged plot. This Abdullah provides (spoiler alert!) with a Pyrrhic victory and a somewhat open ending.
Rachel Joyce
Rave Asian Review of Books In a text-book first chapter—the best opening this reviewer has read in a long time—we are introduced to Margaret Benson, then aged 10 ... [T]he novel is a terrific yarn of derring-do and female solidarity. Not so far beneath the humor, however, lies a much more modern agenda of self-knowledge and empowerment.
Nazanine Hozar
Positive The Asian Review of Books ... could easily be just another slice of \'misery lit\' if its eponymous heroine weren’t such a firecracker ... This complex plot has an equally intricate backdrop. Author Hozar clearly demonstrates the faultlines which underlaid the collapse of the monarchy and the 1979 revolution ... Hozar doesn’t overtly lay the blame for the revolution at any particular party’s door but her choice of protagonist makes some indications ... a valuable lesson for global society now where fake news can so easily be promulgated by a largely unregulated social media.
Yu Miri, Trans. by Morgan Giles
Positive The Asian Review of Books As Tokyo once again gears up to host the Olympic Games in 2020, this novel is a pertinent intervention. Yu makes it clear that the denizens of Ueno Park are not homogeneously evil, they are just disadvantaged. Yu shows intellectuals, unemployed salarymen and divorcees, namely people like us, living among the tarp-and-cardboard population. In this way she makes it clear we are all only one slip away from joining them.
Stephanie Scott
Positive The Asian Review of Books ... a simmering tale of passion and murder ... The seemingly complicated structure works: events in the past are clearly differentiated and Sumiko’s reactions to them are heightened by the first-person viewpoint. It also allows Stephanie Scott to mix a tender, literary love story with a meticulously researched police procedural...The result is seamless, although perhaps not as twisty as average detective fiction. But the more literary parts of the story more than compensate. Scott has a talent for descriptive writing and the ability to convey large ideas in a brief sentence ... There is plenty to learn from this book about Japanese society, legal process, photography and even geography. Scott is also keen to show how events of the past can have long-lasting effects on the present. The strongest theme to emerge however is that of the perils of living your life as others wish ... a strong message of hope and self-realization from an unusually intelligent whodunnit.
Javad Djavahery, Trans. by Emma Ramadan
Positive Asian Review of Books ... a deeply nostalgic tale of love and loss set against the revolution of 1979 ... The characters are so vividly drawn and their setting so comprehensively realized ... Having said that, Nilou is an obvious metaphor for Iran. Before the Revolution, she can speak, dress and act as she chooses. Afterwards, her liberty—both mental and physical—is severely restricted, for which the narrator feels culpable ... My Part of Her should perhaps be read as a warning. It is a novel of realities, not ideas—and certainly not the kind of false ideas which Djavadhery shows lead to the collapse of pre-revolution Iran.
Quế Mai Phan Nguyễn
Positive Asian Review of Books This engrossing family saga, both Quế Mai’s debut novel and her first book in English, provides a fresh, and ultimately uplifting, perspective on the American-Vietnamese war ... By telling the stories of what happened to ordinary people during this troubled time in Vietnamese history, their memories are kept alive and they can live on through their descendants. It’s a message of comfort but also of hope for the future[.]
Tishani Doshi
Positive Asian Review of Books Doshi does not shy away from the more unpleasant features of the Indian everyday, detailing the poverty and savagery of life at the edge ... With whatever family structure she had loosely strung together now gone, Grace belatedly recognizes that the freedom from human connection which she sought was not actually what she wanted or needed ... Her final realization, that \'it’s not about living away from the world but living in it,\' is a thought-provoking theory for those experiencing an existential crisis of their own.
Deepa Anappara
Positive Asian Review of Books Despite the challenging subject matter, Anappara keeps the tone light-hearted ... The gaps in the children’s innocent reasoning are quickly filled in by a world-wise, grown-up reader and rendered the more horrible for it ... Anappara offers no direct solution to the crisis she identifies, although most readers will infer that ending police corruption would be a start. Rather than lecture, she allows the characters to simply tell their stories which proves to be a far more effective method of delivering her message. If enough people hear it, then this story could very well save lives.
Hiromo Kawakami
Positive The Asian Review of Books The search for meaning and identity in an unforgiving environment is a well-trodden path. However, Kawakami states the obvious with such acuity that her prose becomes resonant. The simplicity of the stories and their style is deceptive. Underneath it lies layers of significance on to which each re-reading sheds a little more light. Endlessly thought-provoking, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is all the more remarkable for couching its insights in such accessible terms.
Jamil Jan Kochai
Positive Asian Review of Books The setting of Logar would be a rural idyll if it were not for the war. The black thread of violence runs through every tale and the individual who tells it. It is then that we begin to see the point of the stories which is not just to entertain. They are in fact a vehicle for education, both as an oral history of the family and the nation but also, mingled with religious teaching and fables, a primer for Afghan culture. And, perhaps more importantly, they become a way of absorbing the war more easily. By encasing horrific events in a blanket of \'story,\' the awful realities of conflict become sanitized and distanced ... By threading contemporary life with legend, the reader is challenged with differentiating reality from fiction.
Preti Taneja
Rave The Asian Review of Books Reading King Lear in advance will provide a more immersive experience ... like Shakespeare, Taneja can write both poetically and downright crudely—sometimes on the same page. Her language encompasses a wide spectrum ranging from colloquial English to whole sentences of romanized Hindi to the modern compressions used on social media. Whatever the mode, Taneja’s prose is always intense, detailed and engrossing. Readers will feel the touch of a five-star hotel’s feather pillow as vividly as they smell the sewers of an industrial town’s slum tenements ... We That are Young is also about broken dreams: specifically the betrayal of one generation by its children and more generally the realization that the promises of capitalism haven’t come true for everyone ... Taneja’s message to those that are young: if you don’t like the way things are, now is the time to get up and change them.
Nadeem Aslam
Positive The Asian Review of Books Despite being set in Zamana, a fictional city in contemporary Pakistan, this novel is no fantasy. Its depiction of religious intolerance is quite the opposite—all too depressingly real. Yet author Nadeem Aslam shines hope into nightmare with the notion that love (and books) could, one day, conquer all ... He heaps abuse after abuse on to his characters: bigotry and bullying, followed by torture and imprisonment, all combined with an omnipresent government surveillance looking for thoughtcrime to punish. Just as the boundaries of credibility are reached, Aslam lobs in a matter-of-fact statement which gives the fiction a horrible ring of authenticity.
Vivek Shanbhag
Positive The Asian Review of Books ...this novella is a comforting read until the grounds at the end which leave a surprisingly bitter taste. On the surface, Ghachar Ghochar is a family saga which charts the everyday life of its members as they move from poor to wealthy in one generation. As to be expected, the family becomes corrupted by its newfound riches over time. But author Vivek Shanbhag’s skillful treatment of the cliché turns it into a metaphor for modern India and provides the insight that the impact of economic prosperity isn’t always positive. In particular, the work shows that women are generally the losers in a society obsessed with consumer disposables.