THE BANDIT QUEENS – Parini Shroff

“She’d first eaten her father’s salt, then her husband’s; it was time to eat her own.” “If she was this lonely, Geeta berated herself, she should get a damn dog.” Take “Goodbye Earl” (or, more recently, Taylor Swift’s take on the same theme with “No Body, No Crime”), set it in India and change MaryContinue reading “THE BANDIT QUEENS – Parini Shroff”

WANDERING SOULS – Cecile Pin

“I am trying to carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale, so that a glimmer of truth can appear.” “There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies – everything in between is speculation.” Following the end of the Vietnam War, over 1,000,000 refugees fled Vietnam seeking refugeContinue reading “WANDERING SOULS – Cecile Pin”

STONE BLIND – Natalie Haynes

“I see you. I see all those who men call monsters. And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.” The story of Medusa isn’t about just Medusa.  It could never be just about Medusa because mythology weaves in and out. The gods and goddesses, the Fates and Greys andContinue reading “STONE BLIND – Natalie Haynes”

TRESPASSES – Louise Kennedy

“They were like a tag team, taking turns to fall apart.” Set in Ireland during “The Troubles,” Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (Riverhead 2022) is a weeping wound of a novel about womanhood, love, and family with a violent backdrop of the politics that defined Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. Admittedly, it wasn’t on my radarContinue reading “TRESPASSES – Louise Kennedy”