When Sara’s mother was 8 months pregnant, she lied to the airlines and flew from Missouri back to Kuwait, determined that her daughter be born in the country of her ancestors. This is just the first of many miles and countries crossed by the indomitable women in Mai Al-Nakib’s sweeping novel, An Unlasting Home. A fitting title for a book populated by women whose lives span ... Read More...
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
A Turkish woman lying murdered in a rubbish bin hardly seems like the appropriate subject for a piercingly tender novel about the damage done to innocence in childhood and the bonds of friendship as family, but 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a singular work that defies labels. The same is true of the dead woman, Leila, who, at 40 years old, has been a prostitute ... Read More...
Four Treasures of the Sky
From the near-future in The Candy House I read my way through the distant past in Jenny Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky. The novel is the story of Daiyu, a young girl in China, kidnapped and smuggled to America in the early 1880s. A government law banning all Chinese from entering America had no impact on the market for beautiful young girls, a world Daiyu is forced into. Not ... Read More...
No Land to Light On
Despite being five months pregnant Sama goes to the airport to surprise her husband, Hadi, on his return from his father’s funeral. Only to be met by a large crowd of angry people, with signs, yelling. She can’t enter the building so tries calling him. Amidst the noise, they only speak long enough for Hadi to tell her they won’t let him out, that his passport has been taken ... Read More...
Honor: A Novel by Thrity Umrigar
When Smita arrives in Mumbai she thinks she’s there to help a good friend undergoing surgery. Otherwise, even as a global journalist, she has never returned to the country her family left when she was a teenager. Now, in Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, Honor, she’s forced to confront her past while coming face-to-face with another young woman horribly impacted by the same forces in ... Read More...
The Island of Missing Trees
Cyprus is a country literally divided, right down to its capital. In 1960 when the British finally left they repeated their practice of leaving a political vacuum by not resolving issues between existing groups to ensure a peaceful transition. As a result, the island’s population, mixed between a Greek majority and a Turkish minority, lived with simmering resentments until the ... Read More...
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