A couple of years ago, when I turned the last page of Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King, I felt like I had travelled back in time. I felt I had mingled with knights on horses, visited medieval forts, and met quirky characters that made my head spin, along the way. I felt rejuvenated...
If there’s anything I love better than chocolate it’s a deliciously atmospheric crime/mystery novel. So, it is with great anticipation that I began reading The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo. To add to my excitement the locked room mystery came with a heritage. Originally published in 1946, it is the first book in the renowned...
You know those books that just seem to wrap their arms around you in a warm, soul-enriching embrace? That is what Katie O’Neill’s “The Tea Dragon Festival” did for me. Set in a gentle, loving world where dragons are protective of humans and everyone looks out for everyone else in more ways than one, The...
What do you do when you are ambitious but don’t have the skills? You steal, of course. You do anything to achieve your goal, and everything including people become the means to an end. That’s what Maurice Swift does in John Boyne’s latest “A Ladder to the Sky.” We first meet the devastatingly handsome Maurice...
Studio Ghibli’s movie “Grave of the Fireflies” about a brother and sister who try to survive during WWII in Japan is one of my favourite movies. But the fact that it was based on a short story by acclaimed Japanese novelist Akiyuki Nosaka got lost somewhere in the massive shadow of the Ghibli brand. I...
I was absolutely mesmerized by Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, and it was with great expectation that I picked up Circe, a book that has been wowing most readers since its release. The story follows the rise of Circe, daughter of Helios, the sun god, from a mere nymph to being a powerful sorceress....
The first book I read from Kent Haruf was his last. “Our Souls at Night” swept me away with its quietude and I expected nothing less from the next book I was recommended, which was “The Tie That Binds.” This novel is similar in its quietude but there is a certain bleak beauty to it....
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...
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...
