Book reviews

You can find my book reviews here.

  • Seven things I learnt from reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

    I’ve just finished reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, and it’s stayed with me in a way very few novels do. What begins almost like a Jane Austen comedy of manners, a letter between families trying to arrange a match, becomes something far more expansive and unsettling. This is a novel about love, yes, but also about class, migration, identity, and the strange loneliness of living between worlds. Sunny, trapped between Indian privilege and American aspiration, is brilliantly drawn. Sonia, a gifted writer hemmed in by expectation, is just as compelling. But what really surprised me was Babita, Sunny’s monstrous, snobbish, controlling mother, who somehow becomes one of the most sympathetic figures in the book. Desai achieves something remarkable there. The novel moves across Delhi, Goa, New York and beyond, but never feels showy. It feels lived. There is humour, darkness, exploitation, tenderness, and a real sense of how people get trapped in the lives they inherit. For all its sophistication, it’s also deeply readable. There’s a real “will they, won’t they” energy running through it, even as it tackles much bigger questions. One of the most accomplished novels I’ve read in years.

  • Five Things I Learnt from Tobias Hill’s Writing

    I met Tobias Hill in 1999, in a London literary world that felt alive, exploratory, not yet fully digitised. Very different from now in 2026. We stood outside a sealed Underground entrance in Kentish Town, a space that had quietly taken on another life, hidden, ambiguous, charged. Tobias was drawn to it, not for spectacle, but because he was always interested in what lay beneath. That sense of him has stayed with me. In this blog, I reflect on five things his writing taught me, about mystery, the underground, humanity, metaphor, and the unconscious. Hill’s work moves through cities, objects, and histories with extraordinary precision, always searching for meaning within the specific. I’ve also included a digitally generated image of Tobias, a symbolic portrait rather than a literal one. I suspect, slightly ironically, that the Tobias I knew would have found it amusing. He wasn’t po-faced about art or writing, quite the opposite, he was playful, curious, alive to odd juxtapositions. I think he would have laughed, at least a bit. I offer it in that same spirit of playfulness he brought to his work, while also trying to gesture towards something else he captured so well, the uncanny sense that the familiar world is always on the edge of becoming strange. For me, the image became a way of thinking about Tobias as a kind of time traveller, still moving through the underground spaces he wrote about, still connecting with us through his work. He touched many lives, and continues to do so. I really miss him, even though I did not know him that well; I miss his literary presence in particular. This piece is an attempt to honour his humanity and work. Read the full blog here: https://www.francisgilbert.co.uk/2026/04/five-things-i-learnt-from-tobias-hills-writing/