Aruna Chakravarti is a doyen of historical fiction, spinning out narratives on the Bengal Renaissance with her Jorasanko (HarperCollins, 2013) novels, reviving the story of the Bhawal Prince with The Mendicant Prince (Pan Macmillan, 2022) and doing series of fictitious short stories based on chronicles from the past.

In my early 20s, I moved to New York and started going to a commuter college. I lived far from campus, so in order to get to school, I had to take a bus and then the subway, adding up to an hour of commute each way. My classmates all commuted from various parts of the city; some of them ran to work right after classes. Having been surrounded by friends all my life and not yet knowing how to enjoy my own company, I felt extremely lonely.

Finding an independent bookstore in a new city is one of my most cherished travel experiences.

Although The Wedding People deals with sensitive issues such as depression and suicide, it is done in a light-hearted and an endearingly humorous way.

The God of the Woods caught my attention while I was excavating for my next read on Goodreads.

One of the great pleasures of reading enough of the plays of William Shakespeare is that, after a while, you feel like you know him. British actor Patrick Stewart famously stated, “...he feels like an old friend—someone who just went out [...] to get another bottle of wine.” While Shakespeare scholars have succeeded in creating a rough Shakespeare biography based on historical documents, many of them will admit that there are large gaps in our knowledge.

Lessons in Chemistry is a powerful read for anyone who feels alone in a male-dominated world. For those who have been vilified for having a voice, dignity, and the courage to exist unapologetically in a world that resists change, this novel proves galvanising.

The novella is written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, who represents sloth. He is a nostalgic and unambitious man. Legally and on paper, he is the director of their family business, Sona Masala, although he does no actual work.

For bilingual readers, especially for children of Bangladeshi immigrants, it is striking to see how organically English and Bangla words interact on the page

All’s Well circles one maddening question: what does pain need to look like before someone finally believes you? And how do you stop before it gets too discomfortable?

Some books explain immigrant life through nostalgia. Others through big dramatic events. Sharbari Ahmed does neither in <I>The Strangest of Fruit</I>. Her stories focus on the quieter things like small humiliations, awkward encounters, the private wounds people carry, and the memories they don’t

“Graveyard Shift” is a highly anticipated work by M L Rio, following her success with If We Were Villains (Flatiron Books), released in 2017. Like its predecessor, the novella “Graveyard Shift” also stays in the realm of dark academia; however, the similarities between the two books end there.

Yukito Ayatsuji’s debut novel The Decagon House Murders was first published in Japan in 1978 and translated into English in 2020.

The proof that Dr Niaz Zaman is an amazing writer lies in the fact that she knows exactly how to wound you with four words: “You are too late.”

Revisiting ‘The Long Walk’ (Signet Books, 1979) by Stephen King on his 78th birthday

"You have done an excellent job. People who know English tell me that your translations are better than the originals," said the late Sunil Gangopadhyay to Aruna Chakravarti on her translation of his writings.

Elif Shafak has adroitly balanced the story between Peri’s suffering as a woman and religion’s role in mending our relationships and lives.

“Art is empathy,” Fredrik Backman writes. So is friendship—the kind that stays with you long after the summer ends.The kind you find when you’re 14 and everything is breaking and beginning at once. The kind of friendship that becomes a map back to yourself, years later, when you’re lost in grief, guilt, or even just the quiet ache of growing up. Fredrik Backman’s My Friends is a love letter to those friendships.

In Lakshmi’s Secret Diary, Ari Gautier crafts a dazzling, multi-layered narrative that is as whimsical as it is profound.

Storytelling is not easy, especially when a few words portray a character with depth and just enough strokes to etch the social milieu for certain classes and creeds and the outcomes of political ideologies in post-independent Bangladesh.