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NO NEW LAND

Name: NO NEW LAND
Author: M.G. Vassanji
ISBN: 0-7710-8720-9

by M.G. Vassanji ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 1995

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An intimate portrait of the Indian community in Toronto from Vassanji (Uhuru Street, not reviewed). Nurdin Lalani is an East African of Indian descent who achieves an unimpressive but respectable equilibrium in Africa as a traveling shoe-salesman. But when African independence and nationalization movements of the 1970s make the situation in his hometown of Dar untenable, Nurdin immigrates to Canada with his wife, Zera, and their two young children, Fatima and Hanif. Life in Toronto is difficult for Nurdin. While Zera gets work immediately, and the children easily adapt to Canadian culture, Nurdin himself is jobless and rootless, both intrigued and intimidated by his unfamiliar surroundings. He's also placed in the awkward position of being supported by his wife and feels that he is not respected by his children. (Fatima tells her teachers that her father is a doctor, rather than an attendant, at the Ontario Addiction Centre, where he finally finds work.) Nurdin's solace and escape is in the strong Indian community that has somehow managed to replicate its East African lifestyle in Toronto, albeit modified. Gulshan Bai, for example, who had cooked for the residents of Dar over coal and wood fires with the help of numerous servants, continues to cook, but alone, in her apartment. Vassanji writes that ``it is not unusual to find coming down in an elevator a well-dressed young couple looking stiffly in front, holding...the local version of a bundle that a Gujarati peasant might carry: a plastic bag around several plastic containers.'' Best, here, are the author's descriptions of a transplanted people clinging to their past. The plot, loosely woven around Nurdin's being accused of molesting a woman, is secondary. Clear-eyed, sympathetic, and absorbing.

Pub Date: March 22, 1995

ISBN: 0-7710-8720-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAGIC OF SAIDA
by M.G. Vassanji

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ASSASSIN’S SONG
by M.G. Vassanji

- BOOK REVIEW
THE IN-BETWEEN WORLD OF VIKRAM LALL
by M.G. Vassanji

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.