Reviews

Writeside.net is happy to present its first graphic novel review: Genkaku Picasso by Usamaru Furuya. This is a guest review by Shweta Vachani. Genkaku Picasso is a manga, about two friends, Picasso and Chiaki. Picasso—or Hikari Hamura, to give him his full name—is an artist. After he and his friend are in a terrible accident, […]

Remember the Vikram and Betal stories from back when you were a kid? If you grew up in India, the chances are you’ve heard time at some point or the other. I first heard them from my grandparents, but my most enduring memory of these stories is Sunday-afternoon TV series Vikram aur Betal. I was […]

The year of reviews might be over, but (one hopes) the reviews will keep coming anyway. To start off the year, here’s Peter James’ third book in his Chief Inspector Grace series: Not Dead Enough. It seems that Brian Bishiop, a successful businessman, has pulled off the impossible feat of being in two places at […]

Yep, it’s time for the final review of 2015, and the pride of place goes to Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. At its heart, Fangirl is (yet another?) teenage romance, but it would be doing it a great disservice to call it just that. This is a story of a tumultous year in the life of eighteen-year-old […]

Thirty years before Henning Mankell began plying his trade as writer of Scandinavian crime fiction, there was the husband-and-wife pair of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They collaborated on a series of ten police procedural novels starring Martin Beck, a superintendent with the Stockholm police. The Man on the Balcony is the third book. Unfortunately, […]

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is not your usual detective story. That’s because Mma Precious Ramotswe is not your usual detective—she is “the only lady private detective in Botswana”. And no, you need not be a fan of crime fiction or detective stories to enjoy this book. Mma Ramotswe decided to set up a detective […]

Neverwhere is a stunning, imaginative tale of an “ordinary” man who accidentally stumbles into a parallel existence called London Below, which is a sort of murky underbelly of the regular London, and gets swept away in an unlikely adventure. Neverwhere happened to be the first Neil Gaiman book I read. Needless to say, I sort […]

Much as I admire Ranjit Lal, I’d have to admit that some of his recent work has been a mix of hits and misses. Despite that, he has remained a pioneer of sorts in Indian children’s writing, picking up topics that have been considered taboo for younger readers. In Our Nana Was a Nutcase, four […]

When we were kids, we would listen to same story every day with lunch during the summer holidays. As our grandmother lined us up to feed us, we would demand the story of Rakhal and the rakkhosh (demon), who are frequent characters in Bangla folktales. If she ever got sick of telling the same story […]