Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife Weidenfeld & Nicolson-Orion, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Here are the elements of Téa Obreht’s debut novel that really worked for me: * Her depiction of a society saturated by war, violence, and loss is solid. “We’re
Roma Tearne’s The Swimmer HarperPress-HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Sometimes the placement of a book in your reading schedule can impact that book negatively; it might unfairly cast a light on shortcomings, either the reader’s or the storyteller’s. (I should have
Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley Harper Collins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Lyrics Alley is set in 1950s Sudan, a few years before it gains independence. It’s a time of intense upheaval politically, but the focus of Leila Aboulela's third novel is personal
Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie Canongate, 2011 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) This is a true story: while being delivered to Jamrach’s menagerie near Ratcliffe Highway, a Bengal tiger escaped. “An eight-year-old boy who walked up and patted it on the nose was knocked
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
