A BURNING by Megha Majumdar

Powerful and brutal are just two words to describe this first novel from Indian born, now New York based (she might want to stay there now after publishing this) editor of online digital magazine Catapult. It doesn't pack a punch of quite the same kapow as Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, but it is very similar in its themes of racism, corruption, misogyny, political grandstanding, hopelessness and  rage. With the added Indian element of extreme poverty and squalor. This is not the sort of book you say you 'liked' or 'enjoyed' reading, but if reading is an experience of another slice of life, then this certainly fills that brief.

Set in Kolkata, which is where the author is from, this novel tells the story of three very ordinary people going about their lives, doing the best they can to survive and better themselves in the crazy chaos of a huge Indian city. Jivan is in her late teens, working in a lowly position in a retail business. She has a grim back story, and lives in the slums with her parents. But she gets to dress nicely every day for work, and thanks to a scholarship she is one of the lucky ones who has a ticket out of the slums being able to read, write and speak English. She is Muslim, idealistic, a typical teenager with grand plans and a new iPhone that she has saved her money up to buy. Lovely is is a hijra - an intersex person, usually living their lives as women. This third gender has a unique and highly visible place in Indian society - feared, worshipped and considered bearers of good luck at life events such as births, deaths, weddings etc. Lovely is an aspiring actress, and is also being taught English by Jivan. The third character is PT Sir - the physical education teacher at the school Jivan attended. He wants more out of life too and finds himself caught up in an ambitious and powerful Hindu nationalist movement, realising too late that this new line of work may be a mistake.

A terrorist attack has taken place at the local railway station, killing many, a horrific crime. No one is claiming responsibility, social media is in overdrive, and Jivan makes a thoughtless comment, as most social media comments are, which results in the most appalling consequences for her. Over the course of the next few months, Lovely and PT Sir find that their own actions have consequences, amidst the increasing realisation that despite their dreams and ambitions, as so often happens, they have to sell their souls to get there.

Exceptionally well written, the author is also hitting out at the entrenched, powerful and harmful practices that make the country of India work the way it has always operated and likely to continue to do so. Might pay her to never set foot back in the country of her birth, especially as we are seeing, again, the continued rise of Hindu nationalism at the expense of the minority Muslim population.

THIS IS GOING TO HURT by Adam Kay

This is great, a complete emotional roller coaster of laughter, empathy, grimacing, leg crossing, horror, disbelief, fascination, frustration, hope all bundled up in a massive dose of reality. I loved this for its grittiness, its emotional intensity, how self deprecating and therefore real it is, its warts and all approach, and the damn fine human being who has had the guts to tell us his story. Highly unlikely he will ever get any sort of job in the NHS again, but he Adam Kay, bless his heart, does not care one jot.

It is pretty clear this is a story that needed to be told. It would be easy to see only the voyeurism factor of reading about all the the various ailments and behaviours that take the average person to a hospital in the first place. Much more importantly it is Dr Adam Kay's own story - his own personal, heart-on-the-sleeve story, trying to make sense of the treadmill he found himself on  - why he became a doctor, his career path, the very stressful working conditions and expectations endlessly heaped on him, the deep affinity he felt for many of his patients, which ultimately led to his complete burn out and decision to leave the NHS. Such a human story and mostly set in perhaps the most emotionally intense place in a hospital - obstetrics and gynaecology.

You read this and you wonder how true is it really, parts of it being so unbelievable and bizarre. But it would seem it all is true as nothing shows up in a search, and he appears to have had plenty of legal advice to ensure we really are reading the truth. There may well be a little embellishment from time to time, but it seems the crux of the story is there regardless of any wee extras thrown in. My 25 year old childless daughter read this, and it may well put one off ever wanting to have a baby - her reaction was very mixed, which meant I approached it with some trepidation. As did a friend who has had 3 children so you would think immune to the obstetric stories, but no, she really did not like this book at all. It certainly is not for the prudish....!

Aside from the medical jargon and stories Kay regales us with, and the unrelenting pressure public health systems around the world are under, in this time of the covid-19 pandemic, it is a particularly timely book, helping us - the average user of the public health system - appreciate and acknowledge the amazing and often thankless work the front line doctors, nurses, assistants and anyone else involved in our care do for us when we are helpless, suffering, in pain, scared, vulnerable. These people take it all in their stride, strong and understanding and compassionate for us - wonderful people - bless them. 

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT by Liam Pieper

This certainly left a punch. Devastating ending which prompted me to slam the book shut and throw it aside. At which point I hated this book. But, on reflection some days later, the fact that I had a such a reaction to it shows how outstandingly well written it is, and what an absolute master the author is in his writing.

There are number of clues right from the beginning that lend this story a very dark undertone. Firstly, it is set in the morally ambiguous country of India, where nothing is at it seems. Secondly, the lead character, an Australian man called Connor is beginning to scrape at the underbelly of his own immoral existence to simply survive. Thirdly, Sasha, an American woman has come to India for a stay at a famous ashram, searching for spiritual enlightenment, exhausted with her life. Anyone who has spent time in India will know the advertising is better than the actual experience. The only American woman we know who has found meaning and benefited from the Indian experience is the Eat Pray Love lady who managed to throw Bali and Italy into the mix as well - you are bound to find your own version of paradise in amongst that mix.

The beaches of Goa are the opening setting, where Connor is a grifter working for the local successful 'businessman', scamming tourists - mostly women, and running dive charters. No longer a young man, his mind and body ravaged by his seedy grim life style, and an abusive childhood, he is fast becoming too old for this game. One of his dive charters goes terribly wrong, forcing him to take drastic measures to save himself. By chance he meets Sasha and an interesting vaguely promising romance begins to unfold.

In a nutshell, Sasha is a good person, kind, hard working, somewhat naive. Connor wants to be a good person, deep inside himself he is, Sasha is making him see this. But no, it is not meant to be. Then that ending..... The author makes the reader like these characters, we are rooting for them, hoping and wanting it to all work out. We are engaged and involved with Sasha and Connor, what makes them tick, the progress of their romance, if you can even call it that. There is some hope here that maybe things will turn out well for both of them. But no.... and so good nevertheless. 

MAORI BOY by Witi Ihimaera

NZ national treasure, consummate story teller, weaver of myth and reality, deeply in touch with his inner soul and able to put so eloquently into words the richness of his imagination, Witi has begun telling his own story. And what a story it is. This is the first of three memoirs Witi has written about his life, covering his first sixteen years. It is a joy to read, a privilege to be granted entry into such an intricate, unique and personal family history.

His own personal story is told in parallel to the story of his origins - his whakapapa - where he came from, who came before him shaping him into the boy and man. He goes as far back as the first stories told by Maori about the origins of the world, the gods, how the land of Aotearoa came to be, how his forbears sailed from Hawaikii some centuries ago, the later arrival of the white man, the NZ wars, the two world wars - almost a potted history of New Zealand itself.

It is all part of him learning about his self, where he came from, what and who has made him, with much of the story telling revolving around his four grandparents and the incredibly strong influence they directly or indirectly wielded on the young Witi. Witi himself becomes an independent young lad, well able to stand up for himself in his rural East Coast upbringing. Money was tight, families large, jobs often hard to come by but above all they had pride and self-belief, coming from the strong and tight-knit connections within the extended family structure.

As shown in his early works - Pounamu Pounamu, Whanau and Tangi - he has told many stories drawn from his rich upbringing, and the reader can easily see where the ideas, and stories within his published works come from. The novel  The Whale Rider comes from the local story of Paikea, an ancestor who came from Hawaiki, so called because a whale helped him escape an assassination attempt by his half brother.

Effortlessly weaving the distant past with the more recent past of the last couple of hundred years  with Witi's own early life, this is a tale of considerable imagination, a childhood that while not idyllic  and at times horrible, has given us this special disarmingly honest and humble man who seems to glide between reality and fantasy, gifting us with truly beautiful writing and story telling.

THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL by Baroness Orczy

One of my favourite movies of all time is the 1982 film of The Scarlet Pimpernel with Anthony Andrews in the title role - swoon, Jane Seymour as Marguerite St Just - more swoon, and Sir Ian McKellen as the villainous Chauvelin - oh so fabulous. The film won  an Emmy for outstanding costume design, and is a complete feast visually for this. The acting and the story line are totally over the top, making for a complete entertainment package of a romantic adventure that will whisk you away. I love it - watched it again while reading this. So been a long time coming in reading the book, and it is just as marvellous.

Even though the novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, aka as Sir Percy Blakeney were written well over 100 years ago, this is easy to read, fast paced with a suave and dashing turn of phrase which although somewhat antiquated is delightful and funny to read, very old fashioned, but almost too as if the wonderful Baroness finds the whole premise ridiculous too.

It is 1792, the Reign of Terror is underway in Paris with Madame Guillotine working overtime slicing aristocratic heads from bodies. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a huge thorn in the side of Robespierre and his cronies, miraculously assisting in the escape of many of the aristocracy to the safety of England.  But how does he do it? Pierre Chauvelin has been given the unpleasant task of tracking down the elusive pimpernel, taking him back to Paris  for trial and public execution. But how elusive he is proving to be!

All the English men are dashingly handsome, exquisitely clothed,  manly and gentlemanly all at the same time; all the French men are villainous, dull, badly dressed, dirty and smelly; and all the women French or English could not be more feminine, beautiful, adored and so on. You get the drift. Wildly entertaining - if you love The Three Musketeers, you will love this.

FASHIONOPOLIS by Dana Thomas

The three basic needs in our survival - food, clothing and shelter. And all three have morphed from those bare minimal essentials into huge statements of excess, want, over supply and enormous wastage. We have become better at building sustainably and for longevity. We are much more conscious and aware of where our food comes from, its nutritional value, growing our own food. But clothing? Oh boy have we got a loooonnnng way to go here. Even the most intelligent and well read of us, will have no idea really about the costs to the environment, to the health and welfare of those who make what we wear, the horrendous wastage with what we carelessly discard. It is staggering, shameful, and scandalous.

This book will tell you all you need to know! But at the same time it is not preachy, shaming us not too much for our frivolous purchases and fashion mistakes. If anything the author is educating us about where our clothes come from, how we are sucked into buying, buying, buying, the fashion industry money-go-round. As the writer says she is attacking this subject not just as a journalist but also as a consumer who, unsurprisingly enjoys buying clothes to wear and how fashion makes us feel. She has covered the fashion industry for 30 years so knows what she is writing about. And you can actually google any of the stories she writes about, any of the people and work they are doing to make fashion better. She is the first to admit we are never going to want to stop buying clothing, but that we have to start doing it in a different way.

Being American, the author has focussed primarily on the US  market, but does speak to a number of designers in the UK as well. The American model can be applied just as easily to how clothing is manufactured and sold here in NZ, not only because we have the likes of H and M, and Zara which both come in for strong criticism, but also because, like the US, almost all clothing sold in NZ is made in China, a smaller proportion in India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. These are all countries where sweat shops rule, the working conditions and pay appalling, which to our shame, we have all contributed to.

She goes to towns in the US where in the past manufacturing has been a major employer. The big factories have long gone offshore, but there is a revival taking place. Small producers  are making and dyeing fabrics in more sustainable ways, others  are making garments using these new fabrics - cottage industry I suppose you would call it, but also increasingly selling their products to larger manufacturers, some of it even going off shore back to the factories in China. She looks at the rise of 3D fabric making and printing, speaks to designers using these techniques. She spends quite a bit of time with Stella McCartney who is relentless in trying to minimise the impact on the environment - financing the growing of fabric in laboratories, sourcing her own silk thread due to silkworms almost being wiped out. There are many people and small businesses all over the world doing their bit to bring about a new future for clothes production.

Our own attitudes towards towards shopping and what we wear have to change too. Even reducing the number of times we wash our clothes is beneficial. Finding better ways to dispose of our clothes, buying to wear for more than just a few times, how we can change our clothes into something else, purchasing here in NZ from sustainable designers and outlets - easy to google and find out. These are easy things we can do and in our own small ways also contribute to a more sustainable fashion industry.

THE LIBRARY BOOK by Susan Orlean

We have TV dramas and sitcoms based around cafes, pubs, hospitals, medical centres, schools, but never around a library - perceived fusty dusty place of pointy head fuddy  duddy women and eccentric badly dressed men. Well, let me tell you, a library would be a fantastic place to set a TV series, because like the public hospital emergency room, it is perhaps one of the greatest levellers in our society, where everyone is on the same page (ha ha).

This book is amazing, I can't begin to praise it enough. The writer is a staff writer for the The New Yorker and has written for many other prestigious magazines. She is also a highly regarded author of other non fiction, her most well known book being The Orchid Thief. Her writings show a deep connection with her subject, acute insight and that finely honed journalistic ability to write about it very well.. None more so than in this wide ranging and dazzling adoration of the institution we call the library.

The focus is entirely on a huge fire that started in the Los Angeles public library in 1986 destroying nearly half a million books, and damaging around 700,000 others, as well as historical photographs, magazine collections, archival material and much more. Was it arson - much of the book is a whodunnit for the arsonist, an unusual young man called Harry Peak whom you couldn't make up if you tried. There is a fascinating history of how the Los Angeles public library building and entity came to be with plenty about the development of LA itself,  and the equally fascinating early librarians and staff. The present staff are no less interesting either - past and present staff bringing an enormous love and passion for the work they do. There is much about the history of libraries in general, their purpose in our lives, the desecration of books by burning as a way to control a population,  how libraries are the hub for a community and not just a place to go to on a wet day, the importance to homeless people, the lonely, the poor to have a place of solace and reading to go to.

To the author, libraries and librarians are among the basic cogs that our society and humanity runs on. For many of us the library has been a place we have been going to since childhood, where we found freedom to browse books, choose books, have our own library card, for ourselves, not to please our parents or teachers, just to please our young self. This book is a homage and tribute to the place of the library in our world, as well as being a damn fine suspense filled detective story.

THE SATAPUR MOONSTONE by Sujata Massey

A few months ago I read A Murder on Malabar Hill, the author's first outing with Bombay lady lawyer Perveen Mistry in the 1920s, and what a surprise it was.  And now I have had a chance to read Perveen's second outing. We know quite a bit about Perveen now from the first story - how she came to be the only woman lawyer in Bombay, how she managed to get to Oxford University and graduate as a lawyer, how she had a disastrous arranged marriage, how she escaped the marriage.

In this novel, she again is challenging the norms of a woman in traditional Indian/Parsi society, her intelligent and curious mind no match for the men around her, so expectant of a compliant and most agreeable young woman. Not Perveen. She turns completely on its head the way woman should behave and be in India.

The 1920s were probably the peak of the British Raj in India. There were still many princely states of the country under the control of their traditional maharajas, but the ultimate control of everything in India at this time rested with the British. Perveen finds herself travelling to the remote princely state of Satepur in the mountain ranges south of Bombay. Strange things have been happening with some months earlier the maharaja dying of a sudden illness, and more recently his teenage son killed in a hunting accident. The state is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of the two maharanis or queens - the maharaja's widow, and the mother of the surviving son. Oh, and a daughter. The two maharanis are now fighting over the future education of the young prince and future maharaja. As the women live in a state of purdah, the male British agent is unable to meet with the women to discuss the problem, so Perveen is called into make a recommendation to the agent on the where and how the young prince should be educated. Pretty straight foraward you would think. Well, not really - in India nothing is as it seems, and an ominous threat continues to linger around the palace.

There is no way you could ever call Perveen a scaredy cat. She revels in challenging the expectations of how a well brought up young Parsi lady should be, finding herself admired, ridiculed, threatened, ignored, presumed upon, and in spots of danger. Throw into this mix the tantalising idea of a possible romance with a British man, and Perveen is really walking on thin ice, or in this story literally on the edge of a precipice. She is a great character Perveen, as are all the characters, well drawn and quite believable. There is considerable tension in the plot, how things unfold, evoked through the barriers of distrust and suspicion from the maharanis, the descriptions of the lush and thick forests of the state, the dangerous narrow muddy tracks. The tension is particularly good in illustrating the clashes not only between Perveen and every male she meets but also between Indian and British, with the local and very traditional villagers and way of life, Hindu/Muslim/Parsi interactions. A microcosm of India really, not just then, but still now.

THE JACARANDA HOUSE by Deborah Challinor

I really do dislike writing a negative-ish review, because I know how much effort, research, love, time and heartache goes into writing and publishing a book, but for me, this is definitely not Deborah Challinor's best work. It feels rushed, at times glib, stereotyped in its characters and not all together believable, too many themes, and worst of all predictable. Which is a shame because the issues she tackles are important, the story line is believable and has probably happened, and a couple of the characters are superb.

We are in Kings Cross, Sydney in the 1960s - what a complete den of iniquity this slice of Sydney was back then. I really liked the descriptions of the Cross - it's depravity, seediness, the larger than life characters many based on real people, the dirt and grittiness of it all. Polly Manaia, who featured in an earlier novel of Challinor's,  had fled Auckland some years previously, leaving her now 11 year old daughter in the care  her mother with whom she has a shocking relationship, the reasons for which are revealed towards the end of the book. She is working as an exotic dancer in a strip club, has been for some time, managing her existence with alcohol, uppers and downers. She lives with two transgender performers stalwarts of that Cross institution Les Girls, Rhoda and Star who are the stand out characters in this story. Rhoda and Star both have their own sad back stories, which are lightly touched upon, and I would so like to have known more about them. Actually this was the greatest fault of the book - so much briefly alluded to, so many interesting characters and back stories, that would have made the whole book so much more worthwhile and profound to read.

Polly decides she wants to bring her daughter Gina to live with her. The process she goes through to achieve this I found almost ridiculous - a myriad of plane journeys, subterfuge and deception back in Auckland involving her long suffering brother, a Beatles concert, deceiving her daughter and mother, all the time under the influence of her drug regimen. I also could not really marry her job as an exotic dancer living in a tiny and grim flat with all the accumulated savings she had to finance her trip and setting Gina up in Sydney with her. I digress.

Gina is a delight, a breath of beautiful fresh air into the flat the three of them live in. Are all 11 year olds so capable, so forgiving, so unscarred by her circumstances of life, so articulate, so perfect - I doubt it.  But she is still a lovely character, Actually the fact that Polly is able to function at all is due entirely to her living with Rhoda and Star, and her best friend who is a prostitute - again I couldn't get how a woman with so many brains, common sense and dare I say it what looks like good self esteem, was working as prostitute when she clearly has the potential to be so much more.

Bad sad things happen before the good starts to happen, and there are some crazy scenes too. A visit to a psychic who was a real person in the Cross at this time was just plain ridiculous, and the visit by Polly's mother was almost comedic, again with little depth and perception for the character and her role in the story. This book could have been so much more than it is, but I did love reading about Kings Cross in the1960s.