Sept, 2023 – The Verifiers by Jane Pek
BG2 – September 22nd 2023 Review – The Verifiers by Jane Pek Singapore is where Jane Pek was born and raised. She graduated from Yale University with a BA, the New York University School of Law with a JD, and Brooklyn College with an MFA in fiction. Her short stories have also appeared twice in […]
August, 2023 – Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif
Book Group 2 “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” by Mohammed Hanif. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a tale of love, death, bigotry and violence. It deals with life in its raw form and deconstructs it. It is a love story of Alice Bhatti, a Catholic woman who has just been released from prison and […]
August, 2023 – Seven Moons of Maadi Almeida – Shehan Karunatilaka
Book Group 1 Seven Moon of Maadi Almeida The author says – “1989 was the darkest year in my memory, where there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counterterror squads. It was a time of assassinations, disappearances, bombs and corpses. But by the end of the 1990s, most […]
June, 2023 – Dog Eaters by Jessica Hagedorn
Book Group 2 Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn provided our group with a lively and varied discussion on June 30, 2023. The book is set in Manila and structured as a series of scenes detailing moments in the lives of multiple characters who are sometimes known to each other and sometimes not. […]
June, 2023 – Black Wave by Kim Ghattas
BG 1 – June, 2023 Black Wave by Kim Ghattas The June book for Group 1 was Black Wave by Kim Ghattas who is a Dutch-Lebanese award-winning journalist and author. The book is an examination of how the modern Middle East unraveled and how it started with the pivotal events in 1979 (the Iranian Revolution, […]
May, 2023 – The Girl Who Wrote in Silk by Kelli Estes
BG 2 – May, 2023 The Girl who Wrote in Silk by Kelli Estes The novel is an historical fiction that tells a story of two women from different centuries, whose lives are intertwined. The novel explores themes of race, belonging and acceptance. The role of race in the novel is to highlight the discrimination and […]
May, 2023 – The Plotters by Un Su Kim
BG 1 – May 2023 The Plotters – Un Su Kim Government corruption. Political scandals. Contract killers. Disappearances. Set in contemporary Seoul, South Korea, the world within Kim Un-Su’s novel, The Plotters (2018), focuses on the deaths of random political figures as well as who is pulling the trigger. The shadowy figures responsible for the murders […]
April, 2023 – Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
Book Group 2 The “haves” in this world tend to treat the “have-nots” as invisible. Their mute desperation makes us uncomfortable, so we look through them. Kazu Mori, the narrator of ‘Tokyo Ueno Station’ is literally invisible. He is dead, his spirit seemingly fated to linger among the homeless people who come and go through […]
April, 2023 – Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Book Group 1 Burnt Sugar is an absorbing novel with many twists. For a discussion group there is much to explore and debate. We are introduced initially to a child deprived of a childhood searching for what she missed. As an adult too, her relationships are unraveling – between a mother and daughter, husband and […]
March, 2023 – 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy
BG1 and BG2 meeting March 2023 Review: 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy The March book group meeting was quite special as Book Group 1 and Book Group 2 held a combined discussion meeting of the book ‘912 Batu Road’. We also had the privilege of having the author Viji Krishnamoorthy join the meeting. Viji Krishnamoorthy […]