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Wolf Hall: A Booker winner for story lovers
There’s nothing arty farty about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. The 2009 Booker Prize winner is solid entertainment for anyone who loves a good story. Set in the reign of Henry VIII, it charts the rise of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who becomes the king’s most trusted adviser and the most powerful man in the…
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Second Indian Booker winner in three years
The award for the best English novel by a writer from any country except America goes to… an Indian for the second time in three years! Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize worth 50,000 pounds ($87,000) for Commonwealth writers for his novel, The White Tiger, set in India. Indian Kiran Desai won…
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The White Tiger: Clever but…
I am surprised that Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize but not Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. Would anyone want to read The White Tiger a second time? No doubt it’s a clever book but I was repelled by the details. What makes it unusual is that…
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Sea of Poppies: Riveting history
Englishwomen in the early 19th century bathed only twice or thrice a week in India – and mocked the Indians for bathing every day. The memsahibs – Englishwomen – were bathed in their bathtubs by their maids who soaped and scrubbed them, asking what to them sounded like “Cushy?” “Cushy?” — if they were satisfied.…
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India and the Booker
The Booker Prize (now the Man Booker) has been won by novels set in India six times in the 40-year history of the Commonwealth’s biggest literature prize. That’s excluding The Life of Pi, the 2002 winner by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, which I haven’t read but which is also partly set in India. I…
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