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Last week I had the pleasure of checking out Gaggan’s, a recently opened restaurant that takes a progressive approach to Indian cuisine. The chef, Gaggan Anand, has trained with Ferran Adria and his team in Spain, bringing back a host of mindbending techniques that he is applying to his national fare. Read my review on […]

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Unlike most people, Jane Flemming, the protagonist of Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre’s novel All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, can pinpoint the exact turn of events that transformed her life. A drunken, awkward, and most importantly unprotected bout of unsatisfying sex with her Catholic boyfriend Tom morphed the 19-year old blue-haired punk […]

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South African author and playwright Athol Fugard’s recently-published novel Tsotsi, is a compelling and brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown — a black township in Johannesburg that was razed in the 1950s to make way for homes for the whites — Fugard uses the oppression of the […]

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If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit. Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization”– read the United Nations […]

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Fan Wu’s debut novel February Flowers is a deeply compelling coming of age story, centred around two female university students in Guangzhou, China. Narrated by protagonist Chen Ming, which means “Morning Bright”, readers are introduced to a nation and a people in flux. China in 1991 was caught up in the tensions and conflicts between […]

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Kay Danes’ Nightmare in Laos: The True Story of a Woman Imprisoned in a Communist Gulag is her harrowing personal account of being locked up for a crime she didn’t commit, in a country where human rights are pure fiction. Danes and her husband Kerry, a former Australian SAS officer, established Lao Securicor Company in […]

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In 1967, as the insanity of the Cultural Revolution surged through China, Sirin Pathanothai was hauled up in front of the Red Guards and the Thai Patriotic Front and denounced for being a bourgeois diehard, a capitalist “roader,” and an imperialist lackey. She could not reveal the fact that both she and her elder brother […]

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In 1997, Debbie Singh received a phone call from her mother that would change her life forever. It concerned a letter from Debbie’s adopted brother John, who was in Thailand. “Dear Mum, Sorry it’s taken so long to write but I’ve been putting it off until it had been so long I didn’t know where […]

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It’s truly remarkable how, in early 2004, a global increase in accidents involving people falling down manholes became one of the first indicators of the massive boom taking place in China’s economy. But the fact is that as the “Dragon of the East” grew as a manufacturing base, its need for raw materials, especially iron, […]

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The word “thug” conjures up images of someone who is violent, brutish and crude, probably a bit of a nutter and, more often than not, driven by villainous intent. A network of criminal Indian gangs that favored strangling their victims before robbing them doesn’t normally spring to mind. read more…

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