A Place for Us opens just before the beginning of an Indian family wedding in California. The bride, Hadia, is hoping that her brother, Amar, will show up. No one in the family has seen him for three years, but Hadia hopes their bond is strong enough to bring him back, despite the problems with their father that made him run away. Amar does attend—marking the wedding as both an ... Read More...
The Map of Salt and Stars
Making maps is the fulcrum for Jennifer Joukhadar’s debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars. Rawiya and Nour are young women who tell their stories side by side even though they are separated by almost a thousand years. Rawiya is a sixteen-year-old in ancient Ceuta who longs to see the world beyond her village so she leaves home in the guise of a young man and becomes an ... Read More...
Girls Burn Brighter
One of the reasons I love to read is that it offers me a chance to see places on the page (and in my mind) that I’m not likely to see in real life. Just as importantly it exposes me to experiences and lives utterly different from my own. Last month my first five-star book of the year was Song of a Captive Bird, a novel about an Iranian poet, and, while aspects of a ... Read More...
Speak No Evil
Life provides a graceful arc for the fortunate When you’re a teenager, relationships feel exceptionally complicated, something Niru and Meredith learn in in Speak No Evil, the new novel from Uzodinma Iweala. They are seniors at a private school in Washington D.C. where he is a track star and is set to attend Harvard in the fall. She is also a runner, but with a more ... Read More...
Song of a Captive Bird
Remember its flight, for the bird is mortal. -Forugh Farrokhzhad I was looking forward to learning about a time and culture, far away from my own, but I never thought I’d be so thoroughly seduced by Jasmin Darznik’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird. It is a fictionalized account of Forugh Farrokhzhad, the first woman in Iran to defy her country’s cultural bias and ... Read More...
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
Stay With Me begins in the middle, which is when, after four years of marriage but no children Akin is being pushed by his mother to take another wife. He loves Yejide, but to not have children is incomprehensible in their society and a source of anguish to his wife. When he does give in it is as little as possible, with a woman who he does not allow to live with them and whom ... Read More...
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- …
- 24
- Next Page »
