Ten years ago, a brilliant and shrewd mind emerged out of the social and political schisms of India. As if firing arrows, Aravind Adiga scribed his fictional arriviste hero’s every thought and deed in his 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, The White Tiger, with sufficient force and accuracy that its target – India – Read More
I feel the need to start this review by making a confession. Since its publication in 2016, Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Underground Railroad, has been crowned with some of the most prestigious literary awards: National Book Award for Fiction 2016, The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017, even, oddly enough, the Arthur C. Clarke Award Read More
Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US in 1989. When still a child, she witnessed first-hand the brutal and repressive regime of Ceausescu, the last Romanian Communist leader. A daughter of a pro-democracy pamphleteer, Bugan grew up fearing news of her father’s death, particularly after his imprisonment. She found Read More
The year is 2116, and the place is an Independent Scotland. The Battle of the Sexes in which “men killed women killed men, fathers killed mothers killed fathers, daughters killed sons killed daughters …” (you get the idea) is 20 years in the past, superseded by a period of “kissing-and-making-up-and-fucking”. This results in the massive Read More
Andrew Hussey is a professor of Cultural History at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. His latest book, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, seems to be an extension of his previous one, Paris: The Secret History. However, this work is more overtly political as it reveals the relationship Read More