In Aamina Ahmad's debut, The Return of Faraz Ali, the eponymous character is a police inspector in Lahore, Pakistan in 1968. As the book opens, he receives a call from an important politician saying ...
Read ReviewAamina Ahmad's debut novel, The Return of Faraz Ali, takes place in 1968 in Lahore's red-light district, and several of the characters are tawaifs — sex workers. 'Tawaif' comes from the Urdu ...
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Spanish poet Elena Medel's debut novel The Wonders (translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead) flows on the thrum of two women's internal lives. Maria and Alicia, a grandmother and granddaughter ...
Read ReviewA Brief History of Feminist Organizing in Spain
A significant part of Elena Medel's The Wonders is devoted to the feminist awakening of the character Maria. She grows up in a poor neighborhood during Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's rule in the ...
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'…when our Chinese customers come asking for millet and green onions, buying licorice and cinnamon, I watch them with tenderness, following their movements. I miss you, and I do not even know ...
Read ReviewThe Four Treasures of Chinese Calligraphy
In Four Treasures of the Sky, heroine Daiyu arrives at Master Wang's calligraphy school as an orphan looking for work. She quickly becomes his best student as she learns about the titular four ...
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A golden ticket or a gilded cage? Seventeen-year-old Jani and her younger sister Zosa are not sure what they will find behind the doors of the Hotel Magnifique, but they know it must be better than ...
Read ReviewCaptivating Fantasy Worlds to Explore Next
A trip to Elsewhere in the young adult debut Hotel Magnifique is enough to give anyone the itch to travel. The question is, where to next? Here are some suggestions of fantasy worlds to explore once ...
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'There is certainly a book in the weird coming together of three people as different as the three of us, for a psychologist at least.' So were the reflections of book editor and translator ...
Read ReviewSarah Weinman's Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free sits squarely in one of today's hottest genres: ...
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Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo follows a crucial year in the life of Mungo Hamilton, a boy growing up in the difficult world of Glasgow's East End estates. Mungo's upbringing is marked by anxiety and ...
Read ReviewReligious Sectarianism in Glasgow: Then and Now
One theme of Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo is the quotidian experience of violence. In part, this violence comes from warring sectarian gangs, whose vicious rivalry wreaks havoc in Glasgow's East ...
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Fly Girl
by Ann Hood
"Sheer pleasure. A hilarious and often moving look back at...a young woman's coming of age."
—Dennis Lehane
The Immortal King Rao
by Vauhini Vara
A resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian.
Shadows of Berlin
by David R. Gillham
A captivating novel of a Berlin girl on the run from the guilt of her past and the boy from Brooklyn who loves her.
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