The Immigrant Wife: Her Spiritual Journey by Madhu Bazaz Wangu is a women’s fiction novel of epic proportions. Wangu chronicles the life of Shanti Bamzai, a young woman growing up in 1960s India. Shanti has great dreams of becoming an artist, and forgoes convention by...

Broken Shadows (Shadow Stories Book 2) is a collection of twelve short stories of varying lengths. The author, Radhika Mukherjee, recommends reading each with a break in between to allow time for assimilation of the meaning; they have a central thread - isolation and discovery...

Stereotypical and self-proclaimed bachelor, thirty-year-old Alex still lives at home. Once on the “right” track and seeking his PhD in physics, Alex sacrificed his goal as a university professor at the hands of his one true love. Lucy had made the heart breaking decision that...

The salutary saying, “Go slowly and good luck” is used often by the monks and lamas in this exotic and engrossing book, Tales of Inner Asia by Todd A. Gibson. It seems to be the best way to begin this review, for if the reader...

Walpajirri: The Legend of an Easter Bilby is a wonderful, educational Dreamtime-style narrative written by M.E. Skeel. The history of the animals of Australia (as well as the Indigenous peoples) is discussed before the introduction of Jinda and Jirri – two bilbies which make up...

The Dancing Barber by AC Michael is a novel with powerful historical hints about a Ukrainian who was able to survive and even escape the worst of the cruelties of the Soviet communist dictatorship. This story is set against the backdrop of the Soviet Union...

Chhaya was shunned as a child for the dark skin her family considered ugly. She was imprisoned by a culture that devalued women, focusing on assembling dowries to transfer the burden of their keep to a husband via an arranged marriage. But then came Arun,...

A Hidden Sicilian History is a Christian historical fiction by Ettore Grillo. A man finds an old scroll in the library in Enna, Sicily and translates it. The scroll was written by a Sicilian named Vincenzino who performed in a drama at Enna’s deconsecrated Church...

Growing up, Victoria Woodhull — the sixth of ten children — knew nothing but abuse at the hands of her father, poverty, and all sorts of dysfunctional family ties. Her first marriage proves even worse than the family she was born into. In spite of...

I meet a lot of ex-pats with interesting stories. Most of them can’t tell them very well. JR Ingrisano most certainly can. His well written novel, Captain Jolly’s Do Over, is honestly refreshing and unique. I've heard similar tales here in Thailand and, being from...