Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem (1996) Penguin Books, 1998 Tamarind Mem opens with a telephone call, from Kamini (who is studying in Calgary) to her mother (in India). Tension mingles with fondness: it’s an introduction in broad strokes. The conversation is relayed from Kamini’s perspective and then the narrative slips
Emma Donoghue's Room HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) I’d hoped to re-read Room before writing about it here, in the context of the Orange Prize shortlist, but I still have two fresh reads from this year’s shortlist ahead of me (The
Kathleen Winter's Annabel House of Anansi, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, it’s impossible to imagine Kathleen Winter’s Annabel being set anywhere other than the landscape therein. “In Croyden Harbour human life came
Remember those book banners whose knickers were all twisted up over this collection? I bet this week’s stories, “Baptizing” and “Epilogue: The Photographer”, really got them going. Del has ::whispers:: met a boy. She’s still sorting out what that means. She’s still unsure what it means to be a boy.
Blindfolded, only hearing the prose, or seeing the opening lines pulled from the narrative, would you recognize these stories to be the work of Alice Munro based on the first few sentences alone? The opening of “Changes and Ceremonies”: Boys’ hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous
