Poūkahangatus
Tayi Tibble’s Poūkahangatus is a vivid, often playful examination of her own family history, becoming an adult and the tensions that exist in her lived experience as a young Māori.
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Antichristie
I rarely voluntarily choose to read stories about time travel, even though when done well they not only create narrative potential, but also orchestrate and scrutinize connections between the past and present. And this is exactly what Sanyal accomplishes with Antichristie.
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Takeaway
Takeaway Party Anyone? Chef’s Kitchen Chinese takeaway in El Cerrito, California was a beloved after school institution when I was in high school. There was only a small counter, no indoor seating, and an open kitchen. Every so often a burst of fire would shoot up from one of the furiously moving woks. There aren’t […]
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A Passage North
A Passage North takes its readers along on a contemplative journey through a Sri Lanka traumatised by a decades long civil war.
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Dispersals
Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.
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If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
After the revolution, a woman and a man become acquainted in a café in Cairo. A romance develops between the two of them, but it then takes a violent turn.
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Life isn’t All Haha Heehee
Meera Syal’s Life isn’t All Haha Heehee follows the lives of three best friends who grew up together in the Punjabi community of East London.
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The Time Regulation Institute
The novel, by writer and literary historian Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is considered one of the most meaningful works of modern Turkish literature and offers a satirical glimpse into the processes of modernization during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey.
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Babel
In the Old Testament, the story of The Tower of Babel is told: in reaction to the hubris of humankind, God spreads people across the world and muddles up their languages. The barriers to understanding thus become the penalty for humankind’s hubris. R. F. Kuang’s Babel takes place in a similar time of human arrogance: in 1836, Oxford – with its fictive Royal Institute for Translation, informally known as Babel – is at the centre of the British Empire.
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Anita and Me
In Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel, Meena Kumar is the only Indian girl in the former British mining village of Tollington. While her parents wait in vain for their daughter’s sudden and definitive metamorphosis into the model Indian girl, all Meena wants is to be a Tollington wench.
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