The Secret River

This story is a narration of immigration, building your HOME in another place, leaving behind life to travel to the unknown. This is what happens to the Thornills.

William Thornill was born in one of the poorest places in England, seeing himself forced to steal in order to survive. Sal is his neighbour, who is truly his soulmate and who becomes his wife once he finishes his intership as a boatman with Sal's father. The river Thames is his life. However, he gets used to stealing parts of the shipments he has to cross from one side to the other of the river, untill he is discovered and sentenced to death.

Sal truly saves his life as she encourages him to write to the authorities, sending him and his family to the prison island of Australia.

Now starts a new phase in their lives. At the beginning in Sydney, but once William gets a job transporting goods from the residents living in the shores of the river to the main city. Soon, he finds a place he sees as his future home: Thornhill's Point. However, his idyllic idea of how to make the land productive encounters the existence of aboriginal people.


Through the story, Thornhill and his family finds themselves having to choose between two approaches towards the aborigines: peaceful co-existence, as his neighbour Blackwood has achieved; or violence, the aggressive way another neighbour called Smasher chooses.

The 'civilised' convicts, who have become respectable citizents in the new lands, end up behaving quite 'uncivilised', as the author questions who are the savages. When they are angered, accusing the aborigines of stealing the products of their efforts, they use the word 'thieves', treating the aborigines the same way they were treated in London.

This story of colonisation depicts the effects it had in the aboriginal communities, erasing them from their own lands, enslaving them to the colonisers and their customs, being the victims of a mechanical operation to extinguish them completely.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks

The Light between Oceans

This is a story in which you find yourself struggling with the consequences of the characters' decisions with them, decisions that have been taken with the heart, impetuously, solitude gnawing their souls, making them desperate.

The narrative begins with Australian Tom Sherbourne, returning home from war. He takes a position in Janus Rock lighthouse, a place full of the sound of the wind and the waves crashing the rocks. Later, he meets charming easy-going smart Isabel, marrying her and taking her to his home.

A presence that might have illuminated the isolated lighthouse, soon becomes the images of grief after several miscarriages. One night, they hear the crying of a baby. At the beginning, they think it is the wind, playing a cruel joke on them. Soon, they discover a baby with a dead man in a boat on the shore. Tom thinks of reporting inmediately. However, Isabel silently requests for him no to do it. They name the child Lucy.

Since that day, Isabel's life is full of noises and love. However, day by day, Tom struggles, his consciousness telling him that somewhere the baby is being missed. Two years later, they travel to mainland and soon discover 'they are not alone in the world'.

This story tells the lives of people who build their own home away from the rest of civilisation. When your dreams are washed away, you could take desperate measures to survive. A story of love and responsibility, of grief and solitude, of mistakes and redemption.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks

On Beauty

This novel is Zadie Smith's homage to 'Howards End' by E.M. Forster as it plot loosely parallels Forster's masterpiece, dealing with the issues of class, appearance and, in Smith's narrative, black people's identity.

The story focuses on two very dissimilar families. The Besley family consists of Howard, a liberal university professor, his African-American wife Kiki and their children Jerome, Zora and Levi. The Kipps family is lead by conservative Trinidadian professor Monty, his wife Carlene and their children Victoria and Michael.

Smith cleverly interwines their lives, portraying the clash not only of their ideologies but also of their personal affairs. The conflict between Howard and Monty has being developed for several years, as their different approaches towards art makes they stand in totally opposite positions. During the story, the members of their families become more and more connected, creating bonds that the patriarchs don't agree with: Jerome works as an intern for Monty, having an affair with his daughter Victoria; Kikki and Carlene become friends, not taking into account their different backgrounds and beliefs; Monty's family moves and he starts working in the same university as Howard does, becoming a clearly opposition to what-used-to-be Howard's influential leadership.

As the novel takes place in an imagined upper-class white context, the author places significant issues regarding being black in the development of the novel. For instance, Kikki feels isolated as the black wife of a white professor, saying that '(her) whole life is white. (She doesn't) see any black folk unless they be cleaning.'  Meanwhile, her son Levi resorts to the city to find people he can identified with, changing his way of speaking, copying the street style he feels as the real black talk.

As you can see, this story is complex, intense, intelligent, puzzling, and more! Zadie Smith has created a masterpiece, becoming one of the most promising writers of her generation. Her power of observation fills the novel with a more deep understanding of topics that concerns the citizents of our contemporary world, without disregarding the pleasure you can find in a well-written story.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks

The Namesake

This book narrates the story of the Ganduli family, the Indian parents who moved to the United States to have a better life, and their son Gogol/Nikhil. This diasporic tale revolves around the topic of identity, the notion of 'home' and the cultural crash that the protagonists live in a context totally dissimilar to their original one.

The father, Ashore, teaches at university and his wife Ashima spens her days at home, wearing saris and cooking Indian food everyday. When their first son arrives, they follow the tradition by which an elderly member of the family chooses the baby's name. When the letter with 'the good name' gets lost in the mail, they decide to call him'Gogol'. This name marks the boy as unique, different, 'At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear.'

The parents also feel they do not fit in this new world they have to inhabbit, feeling discomfort even in their own houses as  'For when Ashima and Ashore close their eyes it never fails to unsettle them, that their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them, in accents they are accustomed not to trust.'

The author beautifully portrays the days of the members of this family, struggling to find a place in a new community, the parents keeping their customs and sorrounding themselves with Indians like them; their children trying to figure out their identities in a position of in transit, in a world in which 'home' is buildibg everyday.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks

All Our Names

This story appears to be a narrative about a man called Issac, told from two different points of view in two different times, and , however, I think this character is the less known as the book is closed.

The story is divided in two parts. One is named 'Issac' and displays the adventures two young men live in revolutionary times in Uganda. We are never told the name of the narrator: he is called 'the professor', 'Dickens', 'Heaney' and several names as the narrative goes on and his connection with books  is shown.We learn of the Ugandan war for independence, the rebel group to overthrown the government and the role of the university students in it. The narrator blindly trusts Issac, and in a degree, at least at the beginning, he idiolises him. However, his bond with a powerful man changes everything, and their relationship trembles.

The other part is called 'Helen' and narrates the life of a social assistant in the United States, and the affair she has with a young African man named Issac, who has travelled to America as an exchange student, presumably escaping from a dangerous situation in his country. As tines goes by, Helen starts discovering gaps in Issac's story, and his persistent silence to her questions strenghtens the idea that he is hidding facts from his past that he is embarrassed or ashamed of.

The reader easily makes the connection between the 'Issac' in Uganda and the exchange student in America. However, the author masterfully handles the suspense, and not everything is as it appears to be.

Mengestu is one of the most aclaimed contemporary writer in the United States, giving to his sentences a unique density, portraying the complexity of today world as people from different cultures meet, conflict arising from the diversity of our origins.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks

The Forgotten Waltz

This is the story of an affair between two married people. However, being Anne Enright the writer behind the narrative, it is away from cliches with deep understanding of the conflict that this kind of situation arises.

It starts enigmatic, full of the cleverness of Enright's sentences 'If it hadnt been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive.' In this story we not only find the cheater/husband, the wronged wife, the always waiting mistress; we also have their children, giving this situation started by two a more complicated nature than such a trio.

 In the beginning there is the mystery, the escapades, the danger of being caught. Later, the obsession, the hours waiting outside the other's house. In the beginning, the narrator even humorously claims 'all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It's the nearest thing to magic I ever found yet.'

Then, when they are discovered, they have to deal with their relatives' and friends' anger, disappointment, foolishness. The narrator says 'We're pariahs.'

What the narrator havent thought through is the relationship she must engage with her lover's daughter, a teenager full of anguish and predictable issues. Is there when Enright fully makes us understand how our impulses touch not only our lives but also those's surrounding us.


A clever analysis of how mature and responsible adults are suppossed to be. The development of an affair is dissectionated, making plain how humans are lead by their heart, not their brains.

Ana Ovejero

mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com

instagram:ananbooks