Over by Margaret Forster is a heartbreaking portrayal of how the death of a daughter causes a family to slowly implode. It is about love, grief, pain, loss and the corrosive effects of loss on human nature. Don and Louise’s eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda had drowned in a sailing accident but her body was never recovered.  Louise tries her best to move on to ...

About half a century has elapsed since I last read an Agatha Christie novel.  I was in Form One or Form Two at Kai Chung Middle School in Binatang when I read my first Agatha Christie novel. After such a long lapse, I did not know what to expect when I first started reading Death in the Clouds. According to ...

Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima is the first book that I have read in 2022. It is a relatively thin book at about 200 pages. It is the second Mishima book that I have read, the first being The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Yukio Mishima 三島 由紀夫 (1925-1970) is one of the most important Japanese authors of the ...

A great boon to happiness is to have passion – whether it is reading, video games, photography, stamp collecting, singing, investing, or whatever. Your passion in life is an affirmation of your values, reminding you what’s most important to you outside of your other obligations. It allows you to enjoy something that’s all yours, recharges your life, and instills a deeper sense of meaning to your ...

Qiu Xiaolong’s debut novel “Death of a Red Heroine” introduces Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police and won the Anthony Award for best first novel in 2011. This is my first taste of a crime novel written in English by a Chinese author. I must say it is quite different from those written by Western authors. There is ...

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee is a grim book that focuses on the darker side of life with themes about the powerful and powerless. Published in 1999, it won the Booker Prize and the author was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, four years after its publication.  A 2006 poll of “literary luminaries” by The Observer newspaper  named the book as the “greatest novel ...

When clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin receives the call that his eminent surgeon father, William, is in hospital in an induced coma, he has no idea that his life would soon be turned upside down and everything he has known  about his parents would be shattered. Arriving at his father’s hospital room, he expects to see his mother by his father’s bedside but instead he ...

Taking a short break from Scott Mariani’s novels, I decided to read something different for a change and I chose The Day I Lost You by Fionnuala Kearney.  What a great choice it has turned out to be! This family drama book deals with grief, love, family, relationships,  lies and deception. It is a genre of books that I hardly ever read. ...

In The Lost Relic by Scott Mariani, high-octane hero Ben Hope returns in another rip roaring adventure filled with thrills, conspiracy, drama, lots of dead bodies and a delicate thread of romance. Ben heads to Italy to see an old military comrade, hoping to hire him to take over his “kidnap and ransom” training business in France. Feeling downcast and distracted due to ...

She Chose Me by Tracey Emerson is a gripping, chilling tale of motherhood, rejection, regrets, obsession, abandonment and the fragility of the bond between a mother and a daughter. It is the author’s debut novel and she pulls it off magnificently. Grace is a middle-aged woman who has come back to London after teaching twenty years abroad due to her mother’s deteriorating health. Her relationship ...