Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
Review Sep 21, 2013
Protagonist returns with the burdens of later life
by J.P. O'malley
In popular Irish mythology it’s often said that the seeds of the Celtic Tiger were sown shortly after Italia ’90, when the country’s team reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup soccer tournament for the first time. THE GUTS, by Roddy Doyle. Jonathan Cape, ...
Review Aug 24, 2013
Deft campus romance between aloof professor and one-time mentor
by Hephzibah Anderson
Professor Elizabeth Stone, the heroine of Grace McCleen’s incandescent second novel, is a classic campus contradiction: both quite brilliant and utterly clueless. Despite having a lauded book on Milton and a stack of learned articles to her name, her fellow human beings — indeed, ...
Review Aug 3, 2013
Murderous disintegration of a marriage is all too believable in first and final novel
by Alison Flood
Jodi Brett is beautiful, rich and intelligent. A psychotherapist, she is also, as A.S.A. Harrison’s debut opens, “deeply unaware that her life is now peaking … that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer of her.” Because her ...
Review Jul 13, 2013
A diary washed ashore opens up a world of multiple realities
by Kris Kosaka
A good read transcends into the eternal, melding the real now with a timeless present. Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being” is all that and more: a quietly amazing achievement, a careful construct bridging quantum physics and the role of the reader/observer, ...
Review Jul 13, 2013
Intriguing coming-of-age story masquerading as a crime thriller
by Alison Flood
‘Joyland” comes with all the horror trappings for which Stephen King is known: a sinister carnival, a grisly unsolved murder, a haunted ride. JOYLAND, by Stephen King. Titan, 2013, 283 pp., $12.95 (paperback) “Horror House was a dark ride, but when it was in ...
Review Jun 2, 2013
Complex tale told with great narrative facility
by Alexander Linklater
There is a bland, almost corporate flavor to the title of Khaled Hosseini’s third book, suggesting a large but windy Afghan epic. Its narrative wares are clearly advertised in the book-jacket blurb to reassure his tens of millions of worldwide readers that they will ...
Review May 5, 2013
Second-person narration brings home realities of poverty
by Andrew Anthony
Mohsin Hamid’s new novel comes with a ringing endorsement on its back cover from Jay McInerney, a writer one doesn’t readily associate with subcontinental fictions about escaping poverty. But McInerney can speak with authority on second-person narration, having written “Bright Lights, Big City,” one ...
Review Apr 14, 2013
Three generations of one warring family find their own ways to deal with grief, loss
by Viv Groskop
HOME FIRES, by Elizabeth Day. Bloomsbury, 2013, 256 pp., ￡11.99 (paperback) Elizabeth Day’s first novel, “Scissors, Paper, Stone,” a taut, beautifully written drama, won a Betty Trask award. It was about a mother and a daughter who were holding things together by keeping a ...
Review Jan 19, 2013
Epiphanies for characters, readers
by Paul Mccarthy
WE, THE CHILDREN OF CATS, by Tomoyuki Hoshino, edited and translated by Brian Bergstrom with an additional translation by Lucy Fraser. PM Press, 2012, 266 pages, $20 (paperback) In a moving preface to the English translation, author Tomoyuki Hoshino speaks of his love for ...