The Konkans (Tony D’Souza)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

My goodness, did I love this book! And I didn’t expect to – which makes it all the better. Weird name. Weird cover. Weird premise. But what a superb story. What delicious writing. What heavenly characters. And the possibility that it is autobiography thinly disguised as fiction? Yum.

This is how the author positions it:

Francisco D'Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son — all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the ‘Jews of India’, the Konkans kneeled before Vasco da Gama's sword and before Saint Francis Xavier's cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics.

In 1973 Francisco's Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot and speaks a little. But his mother, who served in the Peace Corps in India, and his Uncle Sam are passionate raconteurs who do their best to preserve the family's Konkan heritage.

Friends, allies, and eventually lovers, Sam and Denise feed Francisco's imagination with startling visions of India and Konkan history. Filled with romance, comedy, and masterful storytelling, The Konkans leaves us surprised by what secrets history may hold for us if only we wonder enough to look.

And all I can add is this: abandon your preconceptions about what you do and do not like to read. Dismiss your ideas about your favourite genre, or style, or setting. Lose your literary biases. And fall in love with The Konkans; truly one of the best books I’ve read in years.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Under a Blood-Red Sky (Kate Furnivall)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Sofia and Anna are imprisoned together in Siberia’s Davinsky Labour Camp in 1933 – and inseparable. When Anna becomes gravely ill, Sofia promises to escape the camp and return with Vasily: the long-lost love of Anna’s life and the chief character in the decades-old, desperately remembered and often retold stories that have, so far, kept the two women alive.

But Sofia’s dangerous quest drives her to a remote village in the Urals, where she discovers an unusual community. Fraught with the ugly betrayals that simmer beneath the dusty streets walked by Stalin-era bolsheviks, mensheviks, kulaks and assorted revolutionaries, it is also a town in which gypsy magic and white arts work hard to keep the good people safe.

Like The Russian Concubine, Kate Furnivall’s last novel of love, loss and liberation in the pre-revolutionary East, Under a Blood-Red Sky is wonderfully drawn portrait of the little people who writhe beneath totalitarian fists. Its love stories also ring beautifully true, based as they are on the part-Russian author’s belief that “…love is also a fundamental reason for survival. Love of someone, of one's family. Or of an ideal. It is like girders round the soul; it gives you strength.”

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Brutal Art (Jesse Kellerman)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

The product of best-selling bookstore stalwarts, Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman (or one of his large brood of siblings, in fairness) was bound to be a writer. What's surprising is that he's pretty good.

It's taken two books, in my opinion, to warm him up for this truly superb third novel, The Brutal Art: a richly peopled, thoughtfully plotted, elaborately sketched story that is as free of genre-imposed formulae and inoffensive orthodox Jewish caricature as his parents' popular offerings are famous for.

Oh, Ethan - how we root for you! New York art gallery owner Ethan Muller uncovers a cache of brilliant but disturbing drawings by a mysterious artist who has since vanished. And before long, old secrets about Ethan's own family begin to hack away at the fictions carefully constructed by those who want the ugly past to remain safely tucked away.

To be frank, The Brutal Art has two features I usually decry: the use of first-person singular ('I') and random flashbacks. But in this manifestation, both are so matter-of-fact, clean, clear and free of not-so-subtle author's guile that they work - all the while leading the reader towards the delicious brown-paper-wrapped gift that is eventual understanding.

Nicely done, Jesse.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Gifted (Nikita Lalwani)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I'm a little freaked out by those popular semi-scathing documentaries on the paranormal genius kids who compete in spelling bees - but more so, by the pushy, scary Nazi-parents who always seem to feature so prominently and so loudly.

Nonetheless, I really got into Gifted, with its troubled, lonely adolescent protagonist, the maths prodigy Rumika, who stresses herself out so much that she becomes addicted to eating cumin seeds. Yes, really. Raw. More than 100 grams a day.

After writing her A-levels at 14, she's accepted at Oxford, and that's when things go horribly wrong. Because teenage angst, nasty-father-induced pain, horny twenty-something hotties and Ivy League pressure just don't gel when you're 14.

So Rumika runs away.

This little book made me deeply grateful that I was classroom clever in my early teens, but nowhere near clever enough to be really different. After all, it's hard enough to be a teenager without having to be different.

Only one problem with Gifted, really: It's so similar in vein (English setting, Indian cultural dislocation, prodigy plot) to others out there that I forgot I'd read it, started it two weeks after finishing it the first time and only realised after half an hour why the storyline seemed like an old friend.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Novel About My Wife (Emily Perkins)

This book disturbed me so profoundly that I had to sit in the sunshine, cuddle my (nice, normal, stable) husband and take a hot shower, just to get through it. Unusually good writing and familiar, flawed, screwy characters notwithstanding, Novel About My Wife is hard to read – and not just because I’m a relative newlywed.

To sum it up, it’s about a charming neurotic, Tom (“skinnyish, fortyish, English”), with a deeply disturbed but beautiful Australian wife, Ann, and how her psychological demons take over their happy hippie lives.

If you like a book to get inside your head and stay there for a while, unbidden, this one’s for you. And yes, I do have one unqualified ‘nice thing’ to say about it: Emily Perkins writes her male protagonist so convincingly and with such absolute authenticity, that I googled her in case she’d used a misleading pseudonym.

But be warned…

If the intermittent flashbacks throw you off as much as they did me, you may have to read this novel twice – something I simply don’t have the heart for.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za