Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Paperback:  Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu.

Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm.  For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her.  Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. 

Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib.

'I didn't ask to be born here,' says Shahana, with regular finality.

Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging;  he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own;  he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.

While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, a way haunted by her mother's ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a 'love marriage', then fleeing her violent husband.  Woven through the novel, Hasina's letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity.  Shaped - yet ultimately not bound - by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream themselves out of the rules prescribed for them.

Beautifully rendered and, by turns, both comic and deeply moving, Brick Lane establishes Monica Ali as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction in 2003.

About the author:  Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents.

She came to England aged three years, her first home being Bolton in Greater Manchester, and later studied at Oxford University.  Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), is an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, and explores the British immigrant experience.  It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and made into a film, released in 2007.

Her second novel, Alentejo Blue, set in Portugal, was published in 2006, and her third, In the Kitchen, in 2009.  Monica Ali lives in London and was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.  Her latest novel is Untold Story (2011).

Rating:  5/5

The Meek Man

Blessed Are They

Musing Upon Something

Quote No 2711

Sage Advice

Murder In The Sentier (Aimée Leduc Investigation Series) by Cara Black

Paperback:  Parisian PI Aimée Leduc finally has the chance to find out the truth about her missing mother but will the truth leave more dead victims in its path?

When Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc picks up the phone one hot July afternoon, the call turns her life upside down.  The voice on the other end, with its heavy German accent, belongs to a woman named Jutta Hald.  Jutta claims to have shared a jail cell with Aimée’s long-lost mother, a suspected terrorist on Interpol’s most wanted list.

If Aimée wants to learn the truth about her mother, she is to meet Jutta at a rendezvous point in an ancient tower in the Sentier.  But when Aimée arrives, Jutta is dead, shot in the head at close range.

Aimée realizes she has stumbled into something bigger than Jutta let on, and that her own life is in danger.  She has a lot of unsolved mysteries in front of her:  Jutta Hald’s murder, resurfaced materials from Sydney Leduc’s terrorist activities in the 1970s, police suppression of important information.

The question is, can Aimée put the pieces together before someone else ends up dead?

Murder In The Sentier (2002) is the third instalment in the captivating PI Aimée Leduc Investigation series set in Paris and was nominated for two Anthony Awards - Best Novel and Cover Design.

To keep up to date with Cara Black's engrossing series, Murder in Saint-Germain is the seventeenth and latest instalment published on 6 June 2017 and fans and readers will be delighted to know that the eighteenth book - Murder on the Left Bank - is set to be published on 19 June 2018.

About the author:  Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 17 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris.  Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris - the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture - and invitations to be the Guest of Honour at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime.  With more than 400 000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Cara was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay Area since she was five years old.  Before turning to writing full-time, she tried her hand at a number of jobs:  she was a barista in the Basel train station café in Switzerland, taught English in Japan, studied Buddhism in Dharamsala in Northern India, and worked as a bar girl in Bangkok (only pouring drinks!).  After studying Chinese history at Sophia University in Tokyo - where she met her husband, Jun, a bookseller, potter, and amateur chef - she obtained her teaching credential at San Francisco State College, and went on to work as a preschool director and then as an agent of the federally funded Head Start program, which sent her into San Francisco’s Chinatown to help families there - often sweatshop workers - secure early care and early education for their children.  Each of these jobs was amazing and educational in a different way, and the Aimée Leduc books are covered in fingerprints of Cara’s various experiences.

Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary.  Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter - which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times.

On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history.  She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and - just like Aimée - gone down into the sewers with the rats (she can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing is not ideal - she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of bother with her shoes).

For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories - but it usually turns into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.

Rating:  5/5

Ghost Hero (Bill Smith, Lydia Chin Series) by S J Rozan

Paperback:  American-Born Chinese PI Lydia Chin is called in on what appears to be a simple case. Jeff Dunbar, art world insider, wants her to track down a rumour.  Contemporary Chinese painting is sizzling hot on the art scene and no one is hotter than Chau Chun, known as the Ghost Hero.

A talented and celebrated ink painter, Chau's highly-prized work mixes classical forms and modern political commentary.  The rumour of new paintings by Chau is shaking up the art world.  There ia only one problem - Ghost Hero Chau has been dead for twenty years, killed in the 1989 Tianamen Square uprising.

But not only is Ghost Hero Chau long dead, but Lydia's client is not who he claims to be either.  And she is not the only PI hired to look for these paintings.  Lydia and her partner, Bill Smith, soon learn that someone else - Jack Lee:  PI, art expert, and, like Lydia, American Born Chinese - is also on the case.

What starts as rumours over new paintings by a dead artist quickly becomes something far more desperate - a high-stakes crisis the PI's will find themselves risking everything to resolve.

Ghost Hero (2011) is the eleventh instalment in the PIs Bill Smith and Lydia Chin series set in New York City's Chinatown and won the Dilys Awards for Best Book in 2012.

About the author:  S J Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of fifteen novels and five dozen short stories.  Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story.  She is also the recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and recently received the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Bronx Noir, a short story anthology S J edited, was chosen NAIBA “Notable Book of the Year.”  She also co-edited, with Jonathan Santlofer, the anthology Dark End of the Street.

S J has served on the National Boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-President of the Private Eye Writers of America.  She speaks, lectures and teaches, and runs a summer writing workshop at the Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy.

In January 2003 SJ was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas made her its Guest of Honor and she was Toastmaster at Bouchercon 2009.

A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, S J Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.

Rating:  5/5

Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Paperback:  Sarong Party Girls (2016), a sensational and utterly hilarious novel, rather like Breakfast at Tiffany's set in modern Asia, is about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism.

On the edge of 27, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends, Sher, Imo, and Fann.  Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh - Western expat - husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow.

Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose. As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centres.  Moving through her colourful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes that threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?

Vividly told in Singlish - colourful Singaporean English, with its distinctive cadence and slang - Sarong Party Girls (2016) brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. 

With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy but her city of Singapore to dazzling, dizzying life.

About the author:  Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York-based journalist and author of “Sarong Party Girls” (William Morrow, 2016) as well as “A Tiger In The Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family“ (Hyperion, 2011). She is the editor of the fiction anthology “Singapore Noir“ (Akashic Books, 2014).

She was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, In Style magazine and the Baltimore Sun.  Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Bloomberg Businessweek, Chicago Tribune, The (Portland) Oregonian, The (Topeka) Capital-Journal and The (Singapore) Straits Times among other places.

She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, where she wrote “A Tiger in the Kitchen,” Hawthornden Castle, Le Moulin à Nef, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Ledig House and the Studios of Key West.  In 2012, she was the recipient of a major arts creation grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore in support of her novel.

Born and raised in Singapore, she crossed the ocean at age 18 to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  Unsure of whether she would remain in the US after college, she interned in places as disparate as possible.  She hung out with Harley Davidson enthusiasts in Topeka, Kansas, interviewed gypsies about their burial rituals in Portland, Oregon, covered July 4 in Washington, DC, and chronicled the life and times of the Boomerang Pleasure Club, a group of Italian-American men that were getting together to cook, play cards and gab about women for decades in their storefront “clubhouse” in Chicago.

An active member of the Asian American Journalists Association, she served on its national board for seven years, ending in 2010.

She started her full-time journalism career helping out on the cops beat in Baltimore - training that would prove to be essential in her future fashion reporting.  Both, it turns out, are like war zones.  The difference is, people dress differently.

Rating:  5/5 (for hilarity and originality)

Last Weekend of November

E L Doctorow (1931-2015), American Novelist, Editor, and Professor

Readers' Conundrum

Truth

Any Successful Person's Past