The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

Set in rural Trinidad, “The Serpent in the Grove” explores themes of betrayal, survival and the resilience of a woman's will.

British singer-songwriter Dua Lipa has launched the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of banned and censored books at Livraria Lello in Porto. Opened as part of the BABELL—City of Books festival, the library features nearly 100 titles challenged or restricted over themes of race, sexuality, politics, and LGBTQIA+ identity, including works by Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and others.

Sami lives in a tiny fishing village off the coast of the Bay of Bengal, eking out a living alongside his grandfather fishing in the same rising waters that claimed his parents and his childhood home.

I first understood that grief has a separate grammar long before I could find words for it.

On the Brink of Belief is flawed and uneven, and at its best, extraordinary. It does not offer comfort or resolution. What it offers instead is a record. Of survival, yes, but also of tenderness, desire, formal experiment, theological argument, and erotic joy. Across this region, in these conditions, with these stakes, people are writing. This anthology insists you take it seriously, and it earns that insistence on almost every page.

What becomes increasingly evident across Bahl’s three novels is her sustained fascination with the emotional significance of almosts and maybes.

In Love Forms (Faber, 2025), acclaimed Trinidadian-British writer Claire Adam explores motherhood, memory, loss, and belonging through the story of a woman searching for the daughter she was forced to give up as a teenager.

Attributes that we associate with grandma would usually be kind, loving, pious, obedient, modest, patient, nurturing, always the one to create wonders in the kitchen; keeper of family recipes and secrets, the one who knows when you need a hug and when a white lie to save you from your parents’ wrath won’t really harm anyone.

I didn’t want to finish reading The Emperor of Gladness. This feeling invariably revisits me when I deeply enjoy reading a book, becoming completely attached to the characters through a surrender to the ‘willful suspension of disbelief’. This novel deals with the expansive forms of love, loss, belonging and the impulses that shape the fragile lives of people left at the edges of America.

On June 19, 2026, the occasion was the 20th staging of “Love Letters”, A. R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, translated and adapted into Bangla by writer and translator Professor Abdus Selim. Directed by veteran theatre actor and director Tropa Majumdar and staged by Group Theatre at the Dr. Nilima Ibrahim Auditorium, the production brought together the acting power couple, Ramendu Majumdar and Ferdausi Majumdar. Their performances transformed what could have easily been a simple reading of letters into something deeply intimate and profoundly human.

Ishiguro’s novels have, over his 40-plus-year career, ranged from historical fiction to fantasy to science fiction.

They say silence is peaceful. They’ve never met mine. Mine arrived at thirteen— uninvited, unannounced.

How far can love reach? From one lip to another? From one corner of a room to the other? Between two cities? Can love traverse the vast emptiness that lies between the constellations? If that is the case, then why…

When Muniza stands on the moss-covered railing and leaps onto the roof of the adjacent house, the hem of her kamiz puffs up like a parachute.

There’s a very specific kind of heartbreak that arrives on a random Tuesday—one morning, you simply wake up and realise that the big, successful life you had envisioned for yourself as a child is not quite the same as the quiet life you are leading now.

What if Beth March in Little Women (1868) hadn’t died of scarlet fever, but had been brutally murdered instead?

Reading Ghost-Eye felt similar to casually dating someone whose family and friends are more exciting and fascinating than the person themselves.

You know when the sky trades its brightness for a low, silver hue, and you wrap your fingers tightly around your tea, seeking that small, steady pulse of warmth. This is the essence of healing fiction. Often rooted in the Japanese concept of iyashikei, these stories focus on the quiet spirit through small, everyday moments. You may have already heard of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop or We’ll Prescribe You a Cat. While those popular favourites have opened a door for many, there are a few other tales worth the read.

The Department of English and Modern Languages (DEML) at North South University is pleased to announce the second offering of its Certificate Course in Creative Writing, set to begin in Summer 2026. This innovative seven-week intensive program is designed to cultivate the next emerging literary voices by providing a structured, mentor-led environment that emphasises Bangladesh’s rich cultural narratives.

Time in Satgaoner Haoatantira does not move in a straight line. The story shifts backward and forward across centuries. Past and present overlap. One generation’s memory suddenly opens into another’s history. Events surface in fragments rather than sequence. Bhattacharya is not interested in arranging the past neatly. He is interested in showing how history survives in lived memory--broken, layered, uncertain, and emotionally charged.