All is not as it seems in Tan Twan Eng’s Garden of Evening Mists. Not for the characters, nor the reader. The story glides between three stages in the life of Teoh Yun Ling, Chinese born and Cambridge educated, recently-retired after long service as a judge in post-Independent Malaysia. She has…
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
In Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil painstakingly reveals the squalid yet almost collegiate world of a small opium den in Mumbai in the 1970s, a place where he spent many years in a haze of self-induced oblivion. Thayil, a former addict, is a renowned poet and his lyricism lifts even the desperation…