Happy Now?

As other blogs have mentioned, Tarun Tejpal doesn't think highly of Indian book reviewers. Perhaps he'll be more satisfied with this profile in The Independent, which describes his book as being "like the man himself: gritty, unrestrained yet bound by a personal code of honour."

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the books editor of The Seattle Times writes that Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide is "a deeply layered, stirring story." Despite a minor cavil about forced plot twists, she concludes that the book is "sophisticated in its observations, poetic in its natural descriptions and astute in its analysis." Her compatriot at The Washington Post Book World agrees: "Ghosh is a storyteller, not a dramatist, and this is a novel of compelling stories, both beautiful and harrowing." (Although some of the dialogue is "laughably corny".)