Triple Choice Tuesday: Radhika’s Reading Retreat

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010 which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part simply visit this post and fill in the form!

Today’s guest is Radz Pandit who blogs at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

Radz is from the bustling city of Mumbai, India, where she has lived all her life.

She was a stock market analyst for almost 15 years but quit after she got fed up with the corporate world. She now works as a freelance writer on finance, while also helping out in the family business.

Besides reading, writing and blogging, she loves art and travel, book photography and food.

Without further ado, here are Radz’s choices:

A favourite book: ‘The Balkan Trilogy’ by Olivia Manning

I adored Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, which, at its core, is a brilliant portrayal of a marriage set during the Second World War. Guy and Harriet Pringle are British expats and we follow their chaotic lives, first in Bucharest and then later in Athens, as the spectre of war looms large.

What makes this trilogy so wonderful is the interesting assortment of characters, not only the protagonists but also the supporting cast who add much richness to the tale. The marriage of Harriet and Guy, who are as different as chalk and cheese (Harriet is reserved and an introvert, while Guy is infuriatingly gregarious) is the focal point of the book, but the other character who also leaves an impact is poor Yakimov, an aristocrat fallen on hard times.

Manning superbly brings to life different cities and their citizens during wartime – the increasing uncertainty of having to flee is nerve-wracking, and yet at the same time there’s this sense of denial that maybe the conflict will not impact day-to-day life after all. I loved the immersive quality of this trilogy; it helped me navigate a particularly challenging time at work, and I looked forward to coming home every evening and losing myself in the book.

A book that changed my world: ‘The Wall’ by Marlen Haushofer (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

I read The Wall during the early days of the Covid pandemic, an apt read at the time given that this is a book about an unnamed Austrian woman on holiday with a couple in an alpine hunting lodge, who wakes up one morning to an unimaginable catastrophe — that she is possibly the last living person on the planet.

The bulk of the book focuses on how the narrator fights for survival and ekes out a living in the forest, utterly isolated. The deep bond she forms with her coterie of animals is sensitively portrayed and is one of the novel’s striking features.

A powerful book about isolation, survival, self-renewal and the capacity to love, there are some wonderful passages on existentialism and the meaning of life, love and caring, and the evolution of the physical and metaphysical selves. The narrator’s inner musings on womanhood and independence spoke to me, and this book also changed my perception of dystopian literature, a genre I didn’t much care for before.

Ultimately, The Wall isn’t about the nature of the catastrophe as much as it is about the profound exploration of its central themes, and in that sense transcends the genre.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘Earth and High Heaven’ by Gwethalyn Graham

Gwethalyn Graham is a Canadian author I discovered thanks to Persephone Books.

Set in Montreal, Canada in the early 1940s, Earth and High Heaven is a wonderfully absorbing novel at the heart of which is a love affair between a Gentile woman and a Jewish man portrayed against a backdrop of racial prejudice. Erica is an English Canadian born in the affluent Drake family. Her father, Charles Drake, is the President of the Drake Importing Company, and the family resides in a sumptuous home in Westmount.

Marc Reiser is Jewish, his parents having migrated to Canada from Austria several years earlier.

Erica and Marc fall in love and wish to marry, but Erica’s parents disapprove of this match, largely because of Marc’s Jewish identity. From thereon, intense discussions follow between Erica and her father as she tries hard to make him see Marc as an individual and appreciate his many qualities rather than being dead-set against him because of general racism towards Jews.

These absorbing, intelligent conversations are the key highlight of the book, and what also shines through is Graham’s deep understanding of the various facets of 1940s Montreal society.

What do you think of Radz’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

I generally find that my book tastes align very much with Radz’s, so it’s no surprise that I love the sound of all of these. I already have The Balkan Trilogy in my TBR having picked it up at a second-hand book sale a year or so ago, but Radz’s other choices are new-to-me titles, which I will eagerly hunt down!