I liked the insight into Vijayanagara, the real empire located in present day Karnataka, India that Rushdie fictionalizes in his magic realism fable. The character of Pampa Campana, the 250-year-old queen who never ages, is a proxy for the kingdom that lasted for that same amount of time from the 14-16th centuries. There are stories within stories here, exposing all the travails of medieval empires, replete with conspiracies, uprisings, internal turf-battles, colonizers, assassinations, and border wars between the Hindus and the Moghuls. A must read for someone trying to understand the multi-faced fabric of Indian history. It is also a proxy for the rise and fall of empires, of how they rise and why they fall.
She will whisper an empire into existence - but all stories have a way of getting away from their creators . . .
'A total pleasure' SUNDAY TIMES
'Shows once again why his work will always matter' NEW YORK TIMES
'Rushdie still has the gift of alchemy' FINANCIAL TIMES
In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she…
This book opened my eyes to the degrees of oppression/openness to slaves practiced by various states in the USA - namely Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana - along the route of the Underground Railway that led north to Canada. Penalties for capture ranged from lashes, to torture, to sterilization. The book portrays the indomitable drive of the human spirit in the character of Cora, a third-generation slave from Georgia on her odyssey north to freedom while battling slave-hunter Ridgeway all the way. The quandary of the liberated slave is also on display - wondering whether to go it on their own or to partner with the white man in an integrated, post-slavery society, while the vigilante white posse looms, ready to strike and destroy all good intentions.
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES BY BARRY JENKINS (COMING MAY 2021)
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016
'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian
'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer
'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist
'Dazzling' New York Review of Books
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the…
This was a realistic tour of Israel from a Palestinian viewpoint - one not readily on offer these days. This is not the Promised Land - it's Hell. A Palestinian female reporter from the West Bank investigates the 25-year-old rape and murder of a Palestinian girl in the Negev desert. Her movements are restricted due to Israeli surveillance and the prospect of hair-trigger violence that could erupt due to heightened tensions in the area. The moral of the story seems to imply "let sleeping dogs lie, because history can repeat itself."
The author herself was penalized when a celebratory event to honour her at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023 was cancelled after the Hamas attack on Israel at the time. Are writers to pay the price for the misbehaviour of their countrymen, or do they exist to expose the warts of society? This book subliminally asks that question.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience…
With Chatbots and Large Language Models changing the world of writing and publishing dramatically, what happens when we introduce a sentient robot capable of feelings into the mix?
Phil Kruger, inventor and serial womanizer, believes he has the answer in his creation, Victoria, the first sentient robot in the world, imbued with beauty, knowledge, and strength, and on a crash course to acquire human feelings through massive infusions of data. Arrayed against him are independent trade publisher, Artemius (Art) Jones and his rebellious and sexually starved daughter, Paula, an editor herself, who is determined to take her father's failing press, Crimson Literary, into the indie world of self-publishing. The rest of the cast is made up of Sebastian Smyth, AI consultant and robotic lover; Kevin Bartolo, revolutionary poet and passionate lover of women and traditional publishing; Diana Dawson, Art's ex-wife who dumped him for the younger Phil; Kamala Shah, the charismatic but calculating heir to the throne of Hind Robotics, the company bankrolling Phil's AI venture; Viresh Shah, chairman of Hind Robotics, thirsting for South Asia to grab the pole position in AI technology.
The worlds of publishing and AI clash, leading to some funny, saucy, and scary situations, leaving us with the existential question of how will we share this planet with our digital creations?
