0694 | Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai
Although this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I couldn’t quite see where this was going or the point of it all. I kept expecting things to happen or the…
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0680 | Family Matters | Rohinton Mistry
Not a patch on A Fine Balance, this starts out alright with a family fighting to survive on the fine margins of lower-middle class Indian life. However, once things settle…
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0676 | The Moor’s Last Sigh | Salman Rushdie
Started out alright but Rushdie can’t seem to just sit still and be a good boy. No sooner have you got settled then he’s up and off on some mad…
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0648 | The Romantics | Pankaj Mishra
This one was a bit tedious to be honest. Samar, a young Indian man falls in with a bunch of foreigners in Banares who are exploring the esoteric orient. They…
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0630 | The Holder of the World | Bharati Mukherjee
Had I not been held captive in a stifling, airless bedroom of a beach bungalow in Zanzibar by the worst sunburn I’ve ever had in my life AND a foot…
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0481 | The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides
You’ll think this is pretty good if you come to it without having first read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. You’ll think he’s a witty, clever incisive writer who has…
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0465 | The Lusiads | Luís Vaz de Camões
There’s no doubt that this deserves its place on the 1001 books list. There’s no doubt that this is one of history’s greatest works, an epic poem of both literary…
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0458 | Animal’s People | Indra Sinha
Not my cup of tea this at all. Yeah, I love India and have read a ton of books about it. But this just didn’t do it for me. I…
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0409 | Behind the Beautiful Forevers | Katherine Boo
Saw this reviewed in The Guardian and as it reminded me of Lapierre’s City of Joy kind of mixed in with A Fine Balance, I thought I couldn’t go wrong…
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0367 | Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf
Context: We wandered down to the beach a number of times to watch the sun set over the volcanoes of Rabaul while I was reading this. REVIEW My sixth Woolf…
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0349 | In a Free State | V. S. Naipaul
Context: Was reading this when I visited the National Orchid Garden of PNG outside Port Moresby. Amazing variety of the weirdest-looking flowers I’ve ever seen. REVIEW I don’t think I’ve…
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0292 | The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Context: The liklik haus or outhouse where I began reading this book in Male. REVIEW Read a number of Stevenson’s works (I’ve reviewed Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde on…
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0280 | Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Context: Finished this off in the midst of packing for five weeks living in a village in Papua New Guinea. REVIEW This took a lot of getting through. Thankfully I’d…
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0272 | The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
Context: Packing our final bags for emigrating to Papua New Guinea REVIEW This is a moving portrayal of life in India shortly after the reign of Indira Ghandi when, in…
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0254 | The Siege of Krishnapur – J. G. Farrell
Context: Read this while we took in a marvellous cream tea in the most idyllic tea garden in Selworthy, Somerset. REVIEW Back in early 1995, I was walking up a…
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0228 | The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
Context: got back to a passtime that I last did nearly 20 years ago while reading this: sketching. REVIEW In the form of an email to the premier of China,…
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0096 | CT Studd: Cricketer & Pioneer – Norman Grubb
Context: Picked this up in an apartment with a view of the Bernese Alps where we stayed in Switzerland. REVIEW Norman Grubb is a bit of a legend. He spent…
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0080 | A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
Context:company on the train from the tea hills to Colombo in Sri Lanka REVIEW This is a mammoth book at 1474 pages and, although it wasn’t always easy going, it…