In Nomad, the 2010 follow up to her earlier memoir Infidel, human rights activist Hirsi Ali gives a brief update on her life since moving to the United States. Through telling her highly personal story, she develops her philosophy and discusses the efforts to ensure that "women everywhere, of all cultures, merit access to education and basic human rights."
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Michelle Latiolais has a rapacious love of words. She plays with them, rolls them around in her mouth, ruminates on their meanings and their origins, reads them backwards even, and links them to other words, constantly coming to different insights and enjoyment of the language.
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Glorious colours riotously abound in Monique Roffey's first novel: 'deep purples, maroons, reds and oranges'. It is set in a delicatessen cum cafe in Shepherd's Bush, London where large, ungainly August Chalmin presides over culinary riches.
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The Cookbook Collector is one of those instantly engaging books that makes you want to tell all your friends that they must read it even when you are only half way through the novel yourself. Author Allegra Goodman did herself a disservice when she described her new novel as "Sense and Sensibility for the digital age", particularly given the number of outraged responses that subsequently appeared on Jane Austen fan pages. Goodman deals with much bigger issues than Jane Austen ever aspired to write about in her novels, however exquisite those classics might be.
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It is interesting to read a book that you are certain will be a love story—though you aren't sure whether happy or ill-fated, requited or unrequited—only to find yourself perpetually poised, waiting for that romance to start. Haruki, an illustrator of books, and Celina, an embroidery artist, meet by chance on a subway in Rio de Janeiro.
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