News & Reviews
The Spoiler
Review by Michele Magwood | Wednesday, August 17, 2011
The timing couldn’t have been better for this blackly funny exposé of the workings of British tabloid newspapers, even if it does take place in 1997. Back then there may not have been cell phones to hack, but that didn’t stop journalists rooting through the medicine cabinets in interviewees’ loos, or going through their garbage.
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Paper Sons & Daughters
Review by Michele Magwood | Monday, July 04, 2011
We’ve all read the big non-fiction South African books, the histories of The Struggle, the biographies of the figures that played a part. But it is the smaller, personal histories of South African families and communities that interest me.
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A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair
Monday, July 04, 2011
Jennifer Egan has just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with this brilliant, exhilarating novel. It would take several hundred words to even begin to relate the plot, a string of overlapping, undercutting, fast-forwarding, darkly funny and often bizarre stories.
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ONION TEARS
Review by Michele Magwood | Monday, July 04, 2011
Although this is a novel, Onion Tears is, like Paper Sons & Daughters, an intriguing portrait of a South African community. Shubnum Khan writes with affection and wry perception about the Muslim community in Mayfair , about broken families, enduring love and regret, and most of all, about food. For food is what defines Khadeejah Bibi Ballim, matriarch of her family.
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The Forgotton Waltz
Review by Michele Magwood | Monday, July 04, 2011
Irish writer Anne Enright won the 2007 Booker prize with her haunting work The Gathering. Her latest, The Forgotten Waltz, is on slightly lighter ground. It is the story of an illicit love affair that ruins two families, not a new theme by any stretch of the imagination, but Enright is too skilled a writer to sink into cliché.
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