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FeaturedBook Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
This book offers beautiful writing and delights with a very sharp approach to the question of identity, “cultural power”, cultural clashed between the West and the East in a context of the dominance of one powerful country such as the United States (US) prior and after the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11… Read more
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FeaturedAn Introduction to Anita Brookner’s Prose
Let me introduce you to one of my favourite writers, Anita Brookner (1928 – 2016) Anita Brookner was an English novelist and art historian, born into the Polish – Jewish family in North London. She was appointed as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge in 1967 and was the first woman… Read more
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FeaturedAn Autumn Visit to West Highgate Cemetery in North London
I hope you are all well and enjoy the autumn if you are based in the Northern hemisphere. A few weeks ago I went to visit West Highgate Cemetery in North London to roam the leafy, ancient avenues of this Victorian cemetery. The cemetery opened in 1839 and there are many well-preserved graves dated back… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: The Distance by Ivan Vladislavić
The Distance by a wonderful South African novelist, Ivan Vladislavic is a magnificent and stunning literary achievement. This is a remarkable, thoughtful read and a real feast for all the bibliophiles. This book is both, global and local; universal and South African – Praetorian; ordinary and surreal; alien and familiar. The ‘distance’ in the book is… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
‘When we walked side by side, did I not feel his humanity most profoundly? Only now did I begin to understand why it was not always through words that people sought each other out and came to understand each other.’ I was profoundly moved by this gem of a book. In ‘Madonna in a Fur… Read more
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Featured6 Compelling Books to Read during the Autumn
A Start in Life by Anita Brookner (1928 – 2016) “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature” is one of the boldest opening sentences I have ever read. The main protagonist, Ruth, turns to books for comfort while navigating through many ambiguities in her daily life such as taking… Read more
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Featured3 Books Set in the Middle East by Andre Aciman, Elif Shafak and Naguib Mahfouz
‘The Architect’s Apprentice’ by a Turkish writer, Elif Shafak Through a young apprentice, the Indian boy called Jahan, we travel to the 16th century Istanbul during the times of the Ottoman Empire under the reign of three sultans: Suleyman, Salim and Murad. We meet many historical figures including Mimar Sinan, the famed architect of that… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Amour. How the French Talk about Love by Stefania Rousselle
“I am single today, and I have been struggling with my thoughts. And after so many years, I want to know what it is just to be two. United. One. I’ve never had that experience. People say they ‘fall’ in love. That word is so negative. I want to ‘rise’ into love. That’s exactly what… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon
‘Returning to Reims’ by Didier Eribon moved me profoundly. This book is about suffering, pain and shame related to one’s social background. Through showing his personal story of social exclusion, cutting ties with his working class origins, Eribon explores a number of important themes including the history of France over the last 100 years, how… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
“For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light,… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Distant View of A Minaret by Alifa Rifaat
“Distant View of A Minaret” by Alifa Rifaat (1930 – 1996) is a collection of fifteen short stories depicting lives of women within a traditional Muslim society.Rifaat shows Muslim women who wish to adhere to strict religious teachings and they see men as the ones who do not follow their religious obligations towards women. She… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano
“Many years later I tried to find that hotel I hadn’t recorded its name or address in the black notebook, the way we tend not to write down the most intimate details of our lives, for fear that, once fixed on paper, they’ll no longer be ours”. I read Patrick Modiano‘s books whenever I feel… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
This a little uplifting book recommendation from my side for anyone in need of magical and cosy stories. “84 Charing Cross Road” by Helene Hanff provides one of these pleasant reading experiences. It is a true story written by real life events; this tale is both life-affirming and sad but still a real treat for… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
“(…) but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind”. “(..) to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day being able to protect what is most valuable to you”. “We are all migrants through time”. “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: A House of My Own: Stories from My Life by Sandra Cisneros
“I feel fortunate at least to open books and be invited to step in, if that book shelters me and keeps me warm, I know I’ve come home”. “I’m fascinated with how those of us who live in multiple cultures and the regions in between are held under the spell of words spoken in the… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: French Lessons by Alice Kaplan
“I have been willing to overlook in French culture what I would not accept in my own for the privilege of living in translation”. French Lessons by Alice Kaplan is an interesting book. The author elaborates on such themes as living life through an acquired language and its impact on one’s course of life; the… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is one of my favourite books I have ever read. This book holds a special place in my heart as it depicts beautifully with all the necessary nuances the most important characteristics related to Russia and Eastern Europe during the course of the tragic 20th century. Having an… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano
‘Honeymoon’ by Patrick Modiano is an evocative, melancholic tale, and, at times, it resembles a frame from “film noir” of the 1950s. Modiano presents the lives of the protagonists from the point of an observer, never depicting the reality in a straightforward manner, but rather showing different angles, playing with the memory, the passage of… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Melmoth by Sarah Perry is a tale of moral complexity related to the human condition. Perry’s book draws upon Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin written in 1820 which once was a well-read book with a greater significance. Perry retells the legend of Melmoth, the loneliest being in this world who wanders across the… Read more
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FeaturedLondon: 10 Literary Places to Visit
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FeaturedBook Review: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
“I would be reading at my desk, something she deemed part and parcel of my job, and considerate as she was, she kept me company but left me undisturbed. We were two solitudes benefiting from a grace that was continuously reinvigorated in each other’s presence, two solitudes who nourished each other.” “I identify with outsiders,… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
“The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us.” “We must do what we can to mend our lives, we owe… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: Reunion by Fred Uhlman
Reunion by Fred Uhlman is such a little book, and depending on the edition, over ninety pages long. It is a story about friendship between two young boys, Konrad and Hans, growing up in Germany of the 1930, where a political landscape was changing drastically. Hans was born into an assimilated Jewish family.
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FeaturedBook Review: Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” Mercier, P., Night Train to Lisbon, London: Atlantic Books, 2009
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FeaturedBook Review: No Place to Lay One’s Head by Françoise Frenkel
“It is the duty of those who have survived to bear witness to ensure the dead are not forgotten, nor humble acts of self-sacrifice left unacknowledged. (…) I dedicate this book to the MEN AND WOMEN OF GOODWILL who, generously, with unfailing courage, opposed the will to violence and resisted to the end.” Françoise Frenkel,… Read more
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FeaturedBook Review: The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
“The path of fiction could easily misled you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert” Shafak, E., The Bastard of Istanbul, Penguin Random House UK, 2015, pp. 96 – 97
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