Witty, energetic and uncompromising, the Indian-born, Manchester-based poet Reshma Ruia’s latest collection A Dinner Party in The Home Counties challenges contemporary social, racial and cultural divides. In this collection, the poet takes the reader on a vivid, multicultural journey filled with intriguing encounters and enigmatic characters.
Category Archive: Reviews
Andrea Tang seems to have it all. She’s a rising mergers and acquisitions attorney on Singapore’s 40 under 40 list. UK-educated Andrea’s goal is, via grueling hours at her Singapore law firm, to make partner at the age of thirty-three. But her family has other plans for her, which propels her to invent a boyfriend at her aunt’s Chinese New Year party. So begins Lauren Ho’s debut novel, Last Tang Standing.
We first learn to swim in the womb, Bonnie Tsui writes, and while “not everyone is a swimmer … everyone has a swimming story to tell.”
Krishnadevaraya may be the most important monarch that most people (well, non-Indian people) have never heard of.
Reminiscent of the tone and atmosphere of Somerset Maugham and George Orwell’s Asia-set novels, Glorious Boy is a Second World War story of adventure and loss, uniquely set in the Andaman Islands, one of India’s farthest flung territories.
A common saying in China is: “The Sichuanese are not afraid of hot chiles; no degree of heat will frighten off the people of Guizhou; but those Hunanese are terrified of food that isn’t hot!” From this old saw, one might be forgiven for thinking chiles native to China. In The Chile Pepper in China, historian Brian Dott seeks to show how “foreign” chiles were introduced and explores how vital they became to these regions’ identity, with spiciness linked to the energy of “revolutionary men and passionate women”.
“For sothe he was a worthy man withalle.” Thus Chaucer, perhaps somewhat ironically (when Chaucer says “worthy”, there’s often a catch) describing the Merchant in the “General Prologue” to his Canterbury Tales. This brief description, minus any irony, would certainly fit Shinohara Chūemon (1809-1891), the merchant who is one lynch-pin of Simon Partner’s enjoyable, beautifully-researched and fascinating account of Japan a few years after what Western writers are pleased to call its “opening” in 1853.