Tag Archives: Fiction

In My Hands Today…

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The Quiche of Death – M.C. Beaton

139176Putting all her eggs in one basket, Agatha Raisin gives up her successful PR firm, sells her London flat, and samples a taste of early retirement in the quiet village of Carsely. Bored, lonely and used to getting her way, she enters a local baking contest: Surely a blue ribbon for the best quiche will make her the toast of the town. But her recipe for social advancement sours when Judge Cummings-Browne not only snubs her entry–but falls over dead! After her quiche’s secret ingredient turns out to be poison, she must reveal the unsavoury truth…

Agatha has never baked a thing in her life! In fact, she bought her entry ready-made from an upper crust London quicherie. Grating on the nerves of several Carsely residents, she is soon receiving sinister notes. Has her cheating and meddling landed her in hot water, or are the threats related to the suspicious death? It may mean the difference between egg on her face and a coroner’s tag on her toe…

In My Hands Today…

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How It Happened – Shazaf Fatima Haider

17280214Dadi, the imperious matriarch of the Bandian family in Karachi, swears by the virtues of arranged marriage. All her ancestors – including a dentally and optically challenged aunt – have been perfectly well-served by such arrangements. But her grandchildren are harder to please.

Haroon, the apple of her eye, has to suffer half a dozen candidates until he finds the perfect Shia-Syed girl of his dreams. But it is Zeba, his sister, who has the tougher time, as she is accosted by a bevvy of suitors, including a potbellied cousin and a banker who reeks of sesame oil.

Told by the witty, hawk-eyed Saleha, the precocious youngest sibling, this is a romantic, amusing and utterly delightful story about how marriages are made and unmade—not in heaven, but in the drawing room and over the phone.

In My Hands Today…

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Troublemaker and Other Saints – Christina Chiu

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Meet the Wongs, Shengs and Tsuis. Each of these families has its own troubles and secrets—and something the other two want. But the three clans—whose members include a matriarch who talks to dead relatives; her nymphomaniac granddaughter; an old man who reads only decades-old newspapers; and a street punk—share a past and face a common future.

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The Dim Sum of All Things – Kim Wong Keltner

139522Have you ever wondered:

  • Why Asians love “Hello Kitty”?
  • What the tattooed Chinese characters really say?
  • How to achieve feng shui for optimum make-out sessions?
  • Where Asian cuties meet the white guys who love them?

Then you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll realize this book is better than a Broadway production of Cats when you read scenes that include:

  • twenty-something Lindsey Owyang mastering the intricacies of office voicemail and fax dialing
  • an authentic Chinese banquet where Number One Son shows off his language skills by speaking “Chinglish”
  • dating disasters with grandsons of Grandma’s mahjong partners
  • the discovery that the real China looks nothing like the pavilion at Disney World
  • karaoke

And all the while Lindsey is falling in lust with the “white devil” in her politically correct office. But will Grandma’s stinky Chinese ointments send him running? Or will Lindsey realize that the path to true love lies somewhere between the dim sum and the pepperoni pizza?

In My Hands Today…

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Equilateral – Ken Kalfus

157936381A British astronomer, Thayer, high on Darwin and other progressive scientists of the age, has come to believe that beings more highly evolved than us are alive on Mars (he has evidence) and that there will be a perfect moment in which we can signal to them that we are here too. He gets the support and funding for a massive project to build the Equilateral, a triangle with sides hundreds of miles long, in the desert of Egypt in time for that perfect window.

But as work progresses, the Egyptian workers, less evolved than the British, are also less than cooperative, and a bout of malaria that seems to activate at the worst moments makes it all much more confusing and complex than Thayer ever imagined.

We see Thayer also through the eyes of two women–a triangle of another sort–a romantic one that involves a secretary who looks after Thayer but doesn’t suffer fools, and Binta, a houseservant he covets but can’t communicate with–and through them we catch sight of the depth of self-delusion and the folly of the enterprise.