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The Life of Pi (Harcourt, 2001; 326) by Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2001. It is about the story of faith, struggle and belief in oneself and in the supernatural. It's also about man's relationship with animals and provides some excellent justification for the creation of zoos. It's also an allegory, perhaps, of the journey towards manhood; with the shipwreck and the struggle to survive at sea representative of the adolescent stage. Eleven-year old Piscine Molitor Patel is travelling with his parents as they relocate to Canada. They ship they were travelling in sank and through a series of incidences, some of them not directly observed by Piscince (or Pi), he found himself with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orang-utan, and a Bengal tiger on his lifeboat. What ensued was a series of carnivorous expressions and after a few days floating at sea, it was left with Pi and his Bengal tiger. The mission was on how to 'tame' the 450-pound monstrosi...

The English Patient (Vintage International, 1992; 302) by Michael Ondaatje is a story about four people set in the period of the second World War in North Africa and Italy: an enigmatic figure referred to simply as The English Patient, because he claims to be English but who was later revealed to be Count Ladislaus de Almásy, an Indian - Kirpal Singh (or Kip, the sapper) an expert in locating and defusing bombs, a young nurse, Hana, whose father died in the war and a Canadian thief, Hana's father's friend, Caravaggio. Almásy or the English Patient arrived at hospital burnt and without identification except a copy of annotated book of histories by Herodotus. Revealing nothing to anyone, Hana became interested in his situation, perhaps seeking redemption for his father's death. When the hospital was moved away from the monastery-turned-hospital to a more appropriate place in another town where there would be facilities and equipment to cater for the sick, Hana chose to ...

 These two stories were taken from The New Yorker June 14 & 21, 2010. What You Do Out Here, When You're Alone by Philipp Meyer Max and Lilli had moved from their modest home in Huntsville to a plush neighbourhood in Oaksville. Unlike Huntsville, they were almost unknown in Oaksville, uninvited to parties and were living under the shadows of the teeming 'filthy' rich. Their new neighbourhood was the place where one could be 'sued for painting [his] mailbox the wrong color, for putting up the wrong fence, for installation of unapproved rooting materials...' But Max was not happy for several reasons. Not because his Porsche business was bad, for he was the 'best Porsche mechanic in Texas, the entire Southwest, if he was hones', in fact business was good and could even do favours for those who could not afford his services. Max was not happy because of Lilli, through whose boss at Goliad Associates, th...

The Handmaid's Tale  (402; 1985) is an imaginative dystopian about a fictional world; a place where all rhetorics about women's place in the world are realised. It is also a world that has been lived before. In this novel, Atwood relied on all that had been said and is being said about women and what they should and shouldn't do. In the fictional world of Gilead, the constitutional government of the United States had been overthrown; its place place taken by Gilead, a state based on the Christian teachings and its purpose for women. In Gilead women are grouped into Wives, Marthas, Aunties, and Handmaids. Handmaids are reproductive 'machines' that keep the population of Gilead from declining. And children are the most prized assets of the day. Rich couples unable to bear their own children contract these handmaids to get pregnant for them. A Handmaid who's unable to get pregnant after several 'servicing' with Commanders are described as unwomen. The...

This blog is aimed at promoting African Literature. Consequently, all interviews, reviews, events, and profiles concern African authors, published or unpublished. However, a suggestion was made that once a while I let others in on non-African authored books I have been reading and so to resolve this, I tried conducting a poll. Unfortunately, the question got lost in the dark background of the blog and there was no way I could edit it. What I am doing today is to also solicit your views concerning the inclusion of non-African authored books. The reasoning behind this blog is simple. I have read a lot of book blogs and almost always, about ninety-nine percent of what they read, reviewed or talked about were Western books. Only a few book bloggers profiled  authored by Africans and even then the usual authors comprising Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ben Okri and recently Chimamanda were the most discussed books. So I decided to use this blog to fill that gap, bl...