Mystic River, the brilliant and award-winning contemporary crime fiction novel by Dennis Lehane, is the tale of three Boston buddies whose lives took divergent courses after one fateful day when they were kids. Now, twenty-five years later, another deeply tragic event, have not just brought them together, but has also set them off on a collision course from which no one can hope to escape unscathed.

 
“You don’t owe nothing to dead people”

Cormac McCarthy, one of the most revered contemporary American fiction writers, won acclaim in literary circles with books like Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and especially his latest work The Road for which he was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. However, one might safely state that [...]

This story is about many things. It is about a miscarriage of justice. It is about relationships. It is about a crime mystery. It is about what society expects of us. It is about national identity. And, yes, it is about two people named Arthur and George. At its core, however, it is about judgement. [...]

As you gaze at the cover of the book, you see a pair of eyes - intense, disjointed eyes that allude at a conflict of perspectives or emotions within an individual. Perspectives on love-and-hate-relationship with a country, on obsessive love, identity and belonging, and on perceived social standing. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, that individual is Changez. - The brilliant boy from Lahore, who manages to get into Princeton with a generous scholarship. On a pleasant day in Lahore, Pakistan, a bearded “[ex]lover of America” reveals to a fearful American stranger his love affair..

Meet Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, who first met when Henry was 36 and Claire, 6. First dated when Henry was 28 and Claire 20, and got married when Henry was 30 and Claire,22. The Time Traveler’s Wife is an original love story that transcends life’s barriers of time and death, and offers a fresh, realistic, and intimate insight into the complications that the space/time continuum theory, (if possible) bring to the already complex matters of love and marriage.Henry deTamble suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to…

Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore could be called a retelling of the Oedipus myth, but not essentially so; Yes, there is an ominous father; Yes there is a troubled teenage boy, and, yes there is also that dreadfully threatening fear of the future. But there’s more. Much more. The novel begins with a fifteen year old boy backpacking and embarking on an obscure journey to search for his mother. The first few words of the novel unfold in a conversation between the boy and his eerily personified superego - “Okay, picture a terrible sandstorm…

How could one explain something that resembles a journal more than it does a typical piece of fiction? Hanif Kureishi makes it very clear with the very first statement what he is about to reveal to us. Jay, his protagonist, tells us that “he’s leaving and not coming back”. He doesn’t give us an explanation at the outset on what has prompted him to make such a life-changing decision, but we know that there are some intimate revelations coming our way (The title is suggestive enough). Sure enough, Kureishi is going to take us on a journey of reflections and confessions..

The cover jacket of Horatio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness poses a question that every one of Moya’s readers ought to ask himself while reading the novella: is its narrator “among the hunted—or is he paranoid? Or is he paranoid and one of the hunted?” This is a question that Moya leaves up to the reader to sort out. The narrator of the story, also the protagonist, is quite a character if nothing else. He is paranoid, mentally unstable, and a bit perverted; but at times one can’t help thinking that he might not be wrong about…

Cormac McCarthy’s tale of a post-apocalyptic America opens on a road where a father and his son trudge along pushing a shopping trolley filled with their earthly belongings in a world all but destroyed, where the dying land is burnt black, forests defoliated and ashened, the sky perpetually gray. It is always cold, dark, damp and gloomy. There is nothing beautiful about the rain falling in this story because it only adds to the prevailing sense of sorrow that weighs heavier and heavier as the story unravels. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.

The Reader by German judge and law professor Bernhard Schlink was published in German in 1995 and translated into English in 1997. In 1999 it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, not to mention garnering various other literary awards. One can read this book as a story of a love affair set in post-war Germany between a 15 year old boy and a woman twice his age. Or one can read it and see the tale as something deeper than mere romance. I prefer the latter angle of understanding and that was how I approached the book.