June 23, 2024
Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
Wonderful evocative book set in India during the mid ‘70s.
A Fine Balance is epic in scope, but the bulk of it takes place in one single year: mid-1975 to 1976.
In an unnamed Indian city on the coast, four people are thrown together, their lives increasingly integrated as political unrest leads to restricted freedoms with the declared State of Emergency.
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Both of these books are coming of age novels that I read as an adolescent, and I believe set me on the path to a lifelong love of reading.
The Greengage Summer is a tense, evocative, portrait of love and deceit set during one long hot summer in France, I Capture The Castle – Cassandra & her family inhabit a castle in conditions of extreme poverty. Cassandra captures both her family’s character & their eccentric life style beautifully in her journals. Different styles & depths of love are explored.
Samuel Pepys
An unequalled self by Claire Tomalin.
Within and beyond the narrative of his extraordinary career, Claire Tomalin explores Pepys’ inner life – his relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts, his agonies and his delights.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagilhara.
Not for the faint hearted but a brilliant portrayal of friendship.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.
There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
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