This luminous novel sweeps through generations of conflicts, material and mental, to journey through the vast landscapes of Hiroko Tanaka’s life. In 1945, the blinding darkness of Nagasaki’s white light swallows everything Hiroko loves: her father, her home and Konrad Weiss. Hauntingly seared by three black cranes on her back, embroidered into the kimono she is wearing when the explosion occurs, Hiroko is tattooed by the bomb’s sinister signature; an eternal reminder of the love she lost.

As she buries Konrad’s burnt shadow she moves to the enchanting city of Delhi in the last days of the British Raj, to acquaint with Konrad’s family and falls under the spell of Sajjad Ashraf, a handsome, aspirant lawyer with a magical tongue for words. Across the barrier of language, and under the “rustling palm leaves of the Delhi monsoons”, Sajjad teaches Hiroko the harmonious enunciations of Urdu. As they build a life for themselves in the new Pakistan an inescapable sense of “uljhan, melancholy and disquiet”, governs even the happier times throughout their lives.

Through the eyes of Hiroko’s son, Raza, and under the backdrop of September 11th, the novel stretches into the frontiers of New York and Afghanistan where family and patriotic loyalties come into question. The interplay of history and personal relationships is tested through the characters’ individual dilemmas, and is further expressed by the ways in which morality can be skewed by our implicit allegiances. As Raza struggles with the suffocating burden of a heavy conscience and the moral predicaments of misguided youth, lives merge together across borders and the reader is transported through the moral frameworks intrinsic to natives of the East and West.

Every page is doused in emotion so vivid one cannot escape the imagery crafted by Shamsie’s words. The helpless sense of never fully ‘belonging’ is expressed through her compelling portrayal of individual sentiments and the implosion of emotions in the face of displacement in conflict. She evokes thought, both rational and emotional, at every stage of the characters’ lives as they come to terms with their own confused realities and their desires to be accepted and understood.

The fourth and final section of the book titled, "The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss", is taken from Michael Ondaatje's, The English Patient; Shamsie beginning her book where Ondaatje ends his, with a mushroom cloud over Asia. The reader is left feeling helpless and provoked as the sequence of events is unpredictable right to the very last page. This book is a powerful depiction of individual dispositions in the face of conflict, further enriched by the convincing characters, all of whom possess a unique charm because of their flaws.

Patrick Taylor’s an Irish Country Doctor must be nostalgic experience for him, as he himself was a GP in rural Ireland of ‘60s. The setting of the novel is in a small idyllic village of Ulster with it’s assortment of unusual characters, accounting for an interesting background. Ballybucklebo, a village near Belfast has just one GP, Dr Fingal Flahrite O’ Riley, a middle-aged, burly, rough tempered man with tough country manners. Barry Laverty is a young doctor from city who is on his first job assignment as a an assistant to Dr O’Riley. It is their complex and funny relationship which makes up for good amount of humor which the novel is liberally littered with. The contrasting and often clashing ways to deal with the patients becomes the bone of contention between the two making them an unusual pair.

O’ Riley is a man perfectly acquaintaned with the ways of country life, and he has his own set of unconventional rules to tackle the hordes of patients who daily crowd his clinic. Barry with his spanking new medical degree is baffled as he is at complete odds with his senior who leaves no space for further arguments and has an overbearing presence. He comes across characters whom he would have never met in his sleek city life, with their eccentricities, beliefs and passion for gossip he almost decides to leave his job. But the ways and fashion of the country gradually warms him and he realizes that even though O’Riley “never lets the customer have an upper hand “ is basically a compassionate man, who know all of patients by their first name. His knowledge is not only confined to their medical history but to the most small and casual happenings of their day to day life and is far more deeper than it appears on the surface. Barry learns more lessons on life love and what matters from O’Riley then he could have ever done in a medical college.

Taylor has managed to capture the air of 60’s Ireland by a deft eye on detail and use of colloquial English. The characters are drawn from his real life experience and the country life with all its charm and excitement for small pleasures of life make for pleasant and hearty reading. The conversations of often injected with high doses of humor with O’Riley’s witty one liners definitely perking up the entire feel. And as the wise cook Mrs. Kincaid would have summed it up ‘...Grand…But a wee bit funny.’