The Red-Haired Woman
By Orhan Pamuk
Symbolic patricide is a necessity, a destiny that can’t be eluded if you are to attain individual freedom. This is one pillar of the latest, masterly novel by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman . But there are many more reasons why this clever, absorbing tale proves why this writer earned his 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature—it is in the capacity of turning a fascinating novel into an archetypal lesson which helps us interpret the present, but at the same time captures a perennial human and political tendency.
A Good Country
By Laleh Khadivi
Laleh Khadivi’s latest, the remarkable A Good Country , proves that fiction may be better suited for getting us into such characters’ heads and understanding how radicalisation takes root. Khadivi’s novel takes adolescence, that fraught period with changing social allegiances, romantic heartbreak, and defiance of family, and places it within the American pressure cooker of Islamophobic tensions. The result is one of the richer bildungsromans I’ve read in a while.
This House of Clay and Water
By Faiqa Mansab
This House of Clay and Water is described, on its cover, as “A story of forbidden love in Pakistan” (an unusual and intriguingly specific alternative to, say, “a novel” or “a romance”). It is animated by a concern for and sympathy with the women to whom bourgeois Lahori, and by extension, Pakistani society, denies the chance to achieve happiness on their own terms.
House of Names
By Colm Tóibín
The revitalisation of mythology, which has been a feature of Indian English literature of the last several years, is also part of a global movement. At its heart appears to lie a craving for old-fashioned heroes who, however, overcome moral categories of good and bad, right and wrong, and simply overwhelm us with their sheer force of character, made vivid in their physicality. This is the spirit that has re-moulded comic book figures like Batman and Superman into ‘dark knights’ and ‘men of steel’; that has spawned Game of Thrones and other sagas dedicated to power-play; and which animates this new book by the Irish writer, Colm Tóibín — a retelling of the story of King Agamemnon and his murderous family.
Shah of Chicago
By Nate Rabe
And Nate Rabe does a great job — even if not as elaborate as of Gregory David Roberts — of peering into the criminal’s mind with Shah of Chicago. Only, you have to wonder whether protagonising an anti-social individual is at all sagacious. No matter how loveable he is rendered by the narrator’s eminent storytelling, you’re sceptical because you know criminals have no conscience, something human beings are supposed but not expected to have.
