Two years ago, I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Christmas Tree and the Wedding”(1848), and even though I don’t celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense,

Published as early as 1978, Rizia Rahman’s well-acclaimed book, Rokter Okshor, narrates the lives of the women who were forced (directly and indirectly) into prostitution in the post-Liberation War era of Bangladesh. 

The Guest List is a classic who-dun-it murder mystery, reminiscent of Dame Agatha Christie’s stories. Lucy Foley’s second novel takes us to a lavish celebrity wedding on a remote island off-coast of Ireland.

When the Mango Tree Blossomed is a voluminous compilation of, as the book’s subtitle proclaims, fifty short stories from Bangladesh, edited by Niaz Zaman.

For anyone with academic or amateurish interest in Bangladeshi writings in English this must be a long-awaited book. The publication of Mohammad A Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan–edited Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (July 2021), possibly the first-ever of its kind, thus came as a welcome piece of news, and I congratulate the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh on publishing it in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, this three-hundred-page useful collection with befitting hardcover and flawless compose.

Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is the third work on the subject by an Indian writer that I have come across in recent years, but it is truly sui generis.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (Riverhead Books, 2020) begins with the protagonist, Wallace, contemplating his father’s death and feeling lonely amongst his friends because they do not understand the experiences he has had. The novel’s exploration of “real life” over the course of a weekend is also one that unpacks identity, race, sexuality, and the sheer boredom and frustration of postgraduate life. 

Black Milk is an autobiographical documentation of Shafak's hesitation, anxiety, perplexity, and self-discovery as she is about to enter the phase of motherhood.

Vivid imagery and symbolism of deep human emotion are found throughout Plath’s novel, as the readers are allowed a look into the mind of a 19-year-old girl who is trapped in the kind of society where women are perceived only as objects of desire and vessels for procreation. 

The version of Bangladesh we received in Babu Bangladesh (2019) was astonishing.

Storytelling is a space in which, as writers and readers, we experience the ways of how we know the world and interact with it.

Tanveer Anoy’s second novel, Duradhay (Anandam, 2021), felt like a punch to my stomach; a wake up call, to be more precise.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, seems to come as an admirable choice compared to the Nobel Prize’s controversial recent history.

Anyone familiar with Toni Morrison’s work would know about the gutting picture of slavery and racism that she painted with her stories.

Identity is mercurial: it shifts and morphs into a new being at the change of a breeze. That change is glacial, and often happens on its own volition; but one can also grasp a new identity, hold it tight till it engulfs the old, and thereby change the trajectory of their life completely.

Oorja, as her name suggests, is a bright young girl who is the main protagonist of the story. The novel begins with her travelling back to India after her mother’s demise. She reaches home only to find her father missing. The rest of the book is a journey of love, healing, and rediscovery of her own self. 

Sufibad O Sufider Shorup Shondhaney (‘In search of the nature of Sufism and Sufis’), written by Syed Rezaul Karim and published in 2020 by Bangla Academy, is a welcome addition to the meager collection of books written in Bangla on Sufism.

From August 2021, Daily Star Books was excited to have joined Bookcentric’s monthly reading challenge, which invites readers to read and review books following each month’s designated theme. Under August’s theme of books with nautical themes, here is what our readers read—and reviewed—last month!

Typical of any Samanta Schweblin story from her International Booker-longlisted collection, Mouthful of Birds (OneWorld, 2019), a sense of anxiety is strongly perceptible here, especially through the characters Fi and Pe. One grows afraid of them as they start showing both lovingly caring and Big Brother-like tendencies. What heightens the ominous halo surrounding these two is the hostages’ inability to translate their emotions; why would someone who provides for you not give you a way out?

Whereabouts (Penguin India, 2021) is Jhumpa Lahiri’s third novel, published originally as Dove mi trovo (2018) in Italian and translated to English by the author herself, as she did with her work of nonfiction, In Other Words (2015).