Pushkin Press is one of my favourite publishers, as regular readers of my reviews know. Thanks to them I have read such gems like The Letter for the King by Tongke Dragt, and The Beggar and Other Stories by Gaito Gazdanov. So, I was delighted when they kindly sent me the children’s classic Maddy Alone...

Malayalam cinema has been charming me all over again in recent times. After the brilliant and powerful movies of the 90s, there was a lull in the 2000s until talent like Dulquer, Fahadh, Parvathy, Aparna Gopinath et al arrived on the scene. More recently, there have been some intense and noteworthy performances from slightly more...

Gushing praise from SM is rare. But Kent Haruf is one novelist she cannot stop talking about. Mary Oliver is one of her favourites too. So, after going through my long queued up NetGalley books, I finally got down to reading Haruf’s “Our Souls at Night” and Oliver’s collection of selected essays “Upstream”. “Our Souls...

It had been a while since I read a graphic novel, and I was really looking forward to reading a good one when I saw Michigan: On the Trail of a War Bride by Julien Frey on NetGalley. Thanks to Europe Comics and NetGalley for sending me the ARC! The book recounts two stories at...

Unsettling. I can wrap up the review for Sayaka Murata’s “The Convenience Store Woman” in that one word. But first, a big thank you to NetGalley and publisher Grove Atlantic for this ARC. The convenience store woman of the title is Keiko Furukura, a slightly eccentric woman in her mid-30s, who has been working at...

When I first read the premise of Joshua Mathew’s “The Last White Hunter” the immediate thought I had was this – I had walked the same streets as Donald Anderson. I couldn’t believe that such a person existed in Bangalore, and that I had probably walked past his house without ever knowing anything about him....

I have always loved reading Russian authors for their ability to delve deep into the psyche of life. I had never heard of Gaito Gazdanov before I got “The Beggar and Other Stories” from NetGalley and Pushkin Press (one of my favourite publishers now). Thank you for sending me the ARC for a review. “The...

“The Tyre” by C.J. Dubois caught my attention with its brilliantly hued cover. But what made me decide to read it was the fact that it’s a book set in India but written by a Frenchman. Surely, that combination is bound to be very interesting. And it didn’t disappoint. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher...

I have read a few Europe Comics in recent times and I have loved most of them. “Turntable” by Zidrou and Raphael Beuchot is no exception. Based on the true story of Belgian violinist and composer Eugene Ysaye’s trip to Africa, Turntable is a breezy read. The book begins with Ysaye saying goodbye to his...

“I was on my own, as I surely always had been, from the beginning to the end.” This thought underlines Salva Rubio’s graphic novel “The Photographer of Mauthausen,” which is set in the concentration camp of the same name during Nazi Germany. The photographer in question is Francisco Boix, a Spanish photographer who survived the war...