6 AWESOME BOOKS STARRING IMMIGRANTS

I am an immigrant, born in Italy but living in the UK since 2009. My mother is also an immigrant (US to Italy), as were my maternal grandparents (Italy to US), and both my maternal great-grandfathers (also Italy to US). I have the immigrant gene. And I think my immigrant gene could be the reason …

BOOK REVIEW: SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH, BY TAYEB SALIH (1966)

In Naughty Dog's 2013 videogame The Last of Us, a fungus turns people into zombies. It latches itself onto your brain and, as it grows, it alters your behaviour, ramping up aggressiveness, making you instinctively attack uninfected humans. Season of Migration to the North is like this fungus. I wasn't going to write a review of …

BOOK REVIEW: AND I DARKEN, BY KIERSTEN WHITE (2016)

“On our wedding night,” she said, “I will cut out your tongue and swallow it. Then both tongues that spoke our marriage vows will belong to me, and I will be wed only to myself. You will most likely choke to death on your own blood, which will be unfortunate, but I will be both …

5 AWESOME BOOKS STARRING WOMEN SCIENTISTS

I read Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent recently and, though I didn't love it like I thought I would, it gets many things right. One of these is the main character's enthusiasm for nature and science--her love of fossils and delight in plantlife, and her excitement at the thought of encountering the Essex Serpent itself, …

BOOK REVIEW: THE ESSEX SERPENT, BY SARAH PERRY (2016)

I should have loved The Essex Serpent. Instead, I just liked it. Sarah Perry's second novel follows a bunch of eccentric characters in late Victorian England as they embrace or resist the massive changes sweeping society and culture at the time--including the rise of socialism, evolutionism, and atheism. These characters include: Cora Seaborne, a young widow …

BOOK REVIEW: PACHINKO, BY MIN JIN LEE (2017)

Pachinko is an almost perfect book. It follows five generations of the same Korean family, from the 1910s to the 1980s. The story of the first generation, in the 1910s and 1920s, is summarised in seven pages, an absolute gem of a first chapter that reminded me of the beginning of Pixar's Up in the economy with …

BOOK REVIEW: FOXLOWE, BY ELEANOR WASSERBERG (2016)

In China Miéville's door-stopping fantasy novel Perdido Street Station, the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin becomes obsessed with understanding the mechanics of flight. He puts the word out that he's looking for anything that flies: "I want birds, insects, bats... also eggs, also cocoons, also grubs, anything that is going to turn into a flying thing. …

BOOK REVIEW: THIS ONE SUMMER, BY MARIKO AND JILLIAN TAMAKI (2014)

Some works of art are so delicate, so simple in their beauty, that any words you use to describe them feel clumsy and oafish in comparison. But you want to tell other people about them, so they too will experience them and fall in love with them. And it's hard to tell people about stuff …

BOOK REVIEW: HAN KANG, HUMAN ACTS (2017)

I read the final 60 pages of Human Acts at the circus. I'd accompanied my wife at a handstand class, and as I waited for it to be finished, all around me people were doing the most shocking things with their bodies. Squeezing their toes, tensing their feet, stretching their arms, faces reddening with effort, veins …

CLOSE RANGE, BY ANNIE PROULX (1999)

"He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair". That's how the third sentence of "Brokeback Mountain" (the short story) starts, and I just could not get past it. I must have been twelve or thirteen. I had been a voracious reader for the entirety of my childhood, but, during my tween …