Words From Vaish

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman                                HarperCollins Publishers 2017                                                                       386 Pages Norman Bates of Psycho infamy had to live with the malign specter of “Mother” that drove him to murder. The eponymous Eleanor in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine similarly labors under the ghost of poisonously murderous “Mummy” – but copes rather better than poor Norman ever did. At lea...

Still Me    Jojo Moyes                Michael Joseph 2018                                                                           472 Pages As the blurb on the back cover put it, Louisa Clark knows many things. And in Jojo Moyes’ Still Me , she’s getting to know a whole lot more - as an expatriate Englishwoman in New York. Much less sentimental than previous outings Me Befor e You (2012) and After You (2015), this latest installment in the adventures of much-loved character “Lou” sees her separated from new beau Ambulance Sam...

Bad Dad David Walliams Illustrated by Tony Ross HarperCollins Children’s Books 2017                                                   422 Pages           There once used to be a preachy school of sententious Victorian children’s fiction wherein the bad boy was eaten up by a lion for his wickedness; whilst the good boy came into deserved fame and fortune, before being drawn up to heaven by God and his angels. Thankfully, kid lit had come a long way since those awful days. Bad Dad is gleefully anarchic, but no less moralistic, plentiful comic havoc notwithstanding. The “Bad Dad” of the title isn’t really bad; he’s a racing champion crippled after a horrific crash and bla...

The Honest Spy Andreas Kollender Translated by Steve Anderson Amazon Crossing 2017                                                     353 Pages Not all Germans were Nazis... Like the Schindler famous for a celebrated list that salvaged a cross-section of a doomed race during the dark years of the holocaust, Fritz Kolbe detested Nazi ideology and despised party hacks, besides hating Germany’s Fuhrer with a passion that ran dark and deep.  Unlike the playboy-profiteer Schindler, the more principled Herr Kolbe was an insider, being a senior civil servant in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. After a promising early career with pre-war diplomatic postings in Spain and South Africa, his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party saw him ignominiously recalled to Germany and given the lowly job of stamping visas and ...

The Queen Of Attolia Megan Whalen Turner Greenwillow Books 2017                                                                                            359 Pages “I wonder why it is so dull, when so much of it must be untrue.” -           -   Catherine Morland on the subject of history,            in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen History, for far too many long-suffering students, is a boringly stupefying recitation of dates and dynasties – with all the r...

My Not So Perfect Life Sophie Kinsella Bantam Press 2017                                                                                                     391 Pages Author Sophie Kinsella’s patented chick lit formula is the literary equivalent of blandly satisfying comfort food like mashed potatoes and chicken soup. My Not So Perfect Life constitutes another helping, only slightly more astringent in flavour. That faint tinge of bitter comes from the setting of the cutthroat w...

[FICTION] The Everything Box Richard Kadrey Harper Voyager  369 Pages A religious/mystical/historical artifact desperately desired by disparate groups of people willing to stop at nothing to acquire it. This has been the plot engine behind everything from  The Maltese Falcon  to  Raiders Of The Lost Ark . Now, writer/photographer Richard Kadrey tries his hand at something also done before in  Good Omens  by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not to mention the humorous apocalypses of Douglas Adams and Christopher Moore... A Los Angeles cat burglar named Charlie “Coop” Cooper - a specialist in purloining magical objects - steals and delivers a small box to the mysterious client who engaged his services. Coop doesn’t know that his latest job could be the end of him - and the world as well.  What follows is madcap mayhem of confusion and double-cross straight out of the pages of Elmore Leonard and Thomas Perry. For a secret US gov...

The policeman at the checkpoint picked his nose with his left hand, scratched himself and spat wetly onto the road. His right hand held a Thums Up bottle and a lighted bidi between gnarled and calloused fingers. A bamboo lathi dangled from his right wrist by its leather loop. His jaws worked rhythmically around a quid of paan. A young constable regarded this revolting sight with nervous affection. His grizzled superior looked exactly like a hard-working Havildar should look. So many social engagements, so little time. The Havildar mournfully contemplated the colossal cabriole curve of his enormous pot belly. The starched khaki of his uniform blouse was strained to bursting point by his protruding paunch and softened in placed by dark patches of perspiration. He philosophically took a swig of his cola and a puff of his bidi. Gather ye roses while ye may. A policeman’s lot is a hard one; what with sundry speeding motorists, eve-teasers, auto-lifters, terrorists – and not to...

“None of the other regulars have turned up for the bus today. So there’s just you and me here in the rain. Well, not quite. There’s still quite a few vehicles on the roads and the odd cyclist wrapped up in polythene. Wonder why all drivers in the rain wear the same expression? More grimly intent on getting who knows where? It’s something I’ve seen since when I was a child living next door to the waterworks. That was a long time ago, but it still feels like yesterday. Even then, the waterworks had seen better days. There was a tangle of rusting machinery there, moldering and overgrown with weeds, around a well that had run dry long ago. We were forbidden to play there, of course. The body of somebody’s kid was found there and the place was supposed to be haunted. Certainly, everyone avoided it; even the municipality that was supposed to be responsible for it. I was a sickly child as endless bouts of chicken pox, measles and mumps kept me mostly bedridden. My bedroom wi...