How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

Winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, Canada’s prestigious nations book award, How to Pronounce Knife is a collection of short stories that capture the immigrant experience.

Rooted in the Lao refugee community in Canada, the stories it tells are nonetheless universal. They reveal the day to day racism, sexism and classism immigrants face and their uphill battle against the workings of power and privilege.

In the titular story, a young girl rejects the transparent illogic of the first letter in a word being silent and chooses instead to defend her father’s phonetic pronunciation of knife.

In 'Chick-a-Chee' a family finds a way to create their own holiday tradition from a baffling ritual of the new country.

In 'Picking Worms', a farm labourer finds a young white boy she helped into a job promoted over her head to become the boss.

We find grinding poverty and the impossibility of getting the ingredients to make the food of home. We meet the factory workers who save up for risky plastic surgery to make their noses will look more like those of the white girls who get to work in offices, the ex-boxer turned manicurist who learns that a relationship with a client can never extend beyond the door of the shop, and the mother who watches from afar because her daughter is too embarrassed to acknowledge her.

Like many refugees around the world, many of the families here have given up good jobs and traded status for safety in a new country.

“Back in Laos, the men who worked in this field have been doctors, teachers, framers with their own land, like my mom. None had set out for a life spent crouching down the soft earth, groping for faceless things in the night.”

These are stories steeped in sadness, but they are also wryly funny and highlight the incredible resilience of immigrant communities everywhere.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Good Immigrant (ed Nikesh Shukla); A Country of Refuge (ed Lucy Popescu)

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories of grinding poverty

Perfect Accompaniment: Sticky rice and papaya salad with dried shrimps

Genre: Short Stories



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Stone Cold Trouble by Amer Anwar

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It: 

Some time has passed since the events of Amer Anwar’s debut novel, Brothers in Blood, and the villains that Zaq and Jags managed to get set down are banged up in jail. But the two friends are about to walk straight back into trouble.

In the middle of the night, Zaq gets a call to say his brother has been beaten unconscious by a gang of thugs who may or may not have been acting on the orders of the now-jailed kingpin. And though Zaq knows his not-quite-yet girlfriend Nina is right to tell him to leave it to the police to deal with the assailants, he cannot let it lie.

And then if that wasn’t trouble enough, Jags’ uncle asks the boys to help him retrieve a family heirloom he recklessly used as a marker in a high-stakes card game.

Once again, we are taken on a journey through the murkier side of West London, moving between the hand-to-mouth existence of the gig economy, and the wealth that resides a short drive away amongst the greenery of the home counties. A world where the police are rarely trusted and where jealousy, honour and revenge are matters to be taken into your own hands.

There are lines that Zaq and Jags would never cross – but can the same be said of everyone else?

When I reviewed Brothers in Blood, I said that I thought he had reinvented the amateur detective genre from Crime Fiction’s so-called Golden Age. On the face of it, Stone Cold Trouble is a thousand miles from the novels of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers – but think of the way that Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey moves seamlessly through upper-crust society, or Miss Jane Marple through village life in middle England, in a way that the police can never emulate. And that is what Zaq and Jags can do through the close-knit Asian communities of West London.

There is plenty of violence here, but it is the violence of hand-to-hand fighting. – and in the sequences where Zaq sits in vigil by his brother’s bedside, Anwar doesn’t shirk from showing the consequences of violence. He never glorifies it.

The relationship between Zaq and Jags still bubbles with humour and the story grips from beginning to end.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: A.A. Dhand, Dreda Say Mitchell

Avoid If You Dislike: Blow by blow descriptions of fights

Perfect Accompaniment: Desi scrambled eggs and chai

Genre: Crime Fiction

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Reviewer: David C Dawson

What we thought of it:

A friend bought me this book recently. My friend is a dog lover. I have two cats. The book is about a woman writer living in New York who is forced to take in an ageing Great Dane when its owner, her lifelong friend, kills himself.

My mother had recently died when my friend gave me the book.

It was the perfect choice of reading material. It’s only 200 pages long and I read it in one sitting as I remained confined to the house during lockdown, indulging my grief.

Nunez has captured the deep and dark emotions of grief in a way that no other writer has ever done for me. At one point she writes:

“Walking in Midtown, rush hour’s peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people should be alive?”

It was as though she had read my innermost thoughts about my mother’s death as I grumpily walked around the supermarket and put those thoughts on the page for me.

That’s not to say this is a sombre book. I have never owned a dog, but I can only conclude that Nunez has done. Her description of the central character’s developing relationship with a lumbering giant of an animal called Apollo, with its bad breath, flatulence and clumsiness through arthritis created a vivid image in my mind’s eye that stayed with me long after I’d closed the book. There is humour, pathos, anger, frustration, and so much love, inside this slim volume.

Nunez reflects on the nature of human relationships with a poignancy and accuracy I have rarely encountered in literature. It’s no wonder that The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction in the US, and was shortlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award.

Highly recommended.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: My Dog Tulip by J R Ackerley

Avoid if you don’t like: suicide references

Ideal accompaniments: A four-legged friend

Genre: Divorce fiction, animal fiction

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Aria by Nazanine Hozar

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

“My girl, there’s a lot you still need to learn about this country, about its people. It is seven thousand years old, maybe more. When something is that old, it begins to crack. It beings to rot. The oldest tree is the first to burn, right?”

This is the second book I have read this year by an Iranian author in exile and spanning the period of the Iran’s Islamic revolution. But Nazanine Hozar’s Aria is a very different kind of novel to Shookefeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Azar’s book, which opens in the middle of the revolution and brings us close the present day, is woven with Persian folklore. Hozar’s novel, on the other hand, begins in the 1950s and draws together the threads that brought about the revolution and created its fanatics.

Aria is a baby girl abandoned in an alleyway by her desperate mother and found by chance by a man in a childless and loveless marriage. He is determined to save the baby, but his wife is less than impressed with his philanthropy.

It is the twists and turns of Aria’s life that we follow for the rest of the novel, as she leaves the desperately poor South City to live with a family who were once silversmiths to the Shahs. Around her are a panoply of characters – there are Aria’s three ‘mothers’, Mehri, Zahra and Fereshteh. Her father and his friend Rameen. Kamran, the boy with the harelip, who befriends her when she needs it most. Her schoolfriends, Mitra and Hamlet.

Through them, we glimpse the different religious groups that make up Iran’s diverse society – the Zoroastrians, the Christians, the Jews, all living in an uneasy relationship with the Muslim majority. And we witness the swelling of different forces opposed to the Shah – forces who briefly imagine they are forming a coalition, only to discover that fanaticism has no allies, and that they are swapping one form of oppression and cruelty for another.

One of the things that Hozar does brilliantly is to capture ambiguity. None of her characters are wholly good or wholly bad. They all tread a path of difficult decisions, for which individually there are no perfect choices, but which collectively can lead them in some very dark directions. Aria’s father sums this up well:

“Years ago, Rameen had read to him about the Mona Lisa, saying the reason everyone cherished the painting so much was because of the duplicitous nature it depicted, containing within the curve of a half smile, love and hatred, good and bad. Now he was beginning to see all of life like this, too.”

A deeply moving novel, and one that explains much that I remembered but never fully understood about the events that unfolded in Iran  between 1979 and 1981.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shookefeh Azar, The Secret Letters from X to A by Nasrin Parvaz.

Avoid If You Dislike: Depictions of childhood poverty and deprivation

Perfect Accompaniment: Abgoosht (Persian stew of lamb and childpeas)

Genre: Literary Fiction, Modern Historical Fiction,

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