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.

In the early 2000s, remixed versions of Bangla folk songs flooded neighbourhood corners during evening street matches and nighttime ceremonial events, which blurred the elusive nature of melancholia and yearning in the beats and celebration.

Though human beings speak in prose in everyday life, the astonishing truth is that poetry is humanity’s first artistic love.

I read poems often, and recently I came across a book titled Fenaphul. The cover—painted with soft blue and white watercolour splotches—immediately caught my attention. I decided to read it when I learned that it had received the Oitijjhya-Shantanu Kaiser Literary Award 2025 and was written by a young poet.

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.

“Agunmukha” translates to “fire-mouth” in English. The word mirrors the tumultuous life of Noorjahan Bose, shaped by her early years in cyclone- and flood-prone small towns of Barisal; her experience of sexual violence at the age of 10; the loss of Imamuddin, her first love and husband, to smallpox; single motherhood; and her later marriage to Swadesh Bose, a Hindu man—an interfaith union opposed by society.

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 While Shakespeare scholars have succeeded in creating a rough Shakespeare biography based on historical documents, many of them will admit that there are large gaps in our knowledge.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.

Twelve Churches succeeds in its ambitious goal of revealing Christianity's global complexity through architecture and human stories, embracing the deepest contested contradictions that add to the pageantry of religious faith in the modern world.

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

The author of this book is the protagonist of a charming inter-cultural romance. He is one of fewer than a handful of living Westerners who fortuitously fell in love with Bengali literature and made a distinguished career of teaching it—at the University of Chicago in his case.

Buried beneath masses of mangled bodies of countless innocents slowly pulled from the shrapnel and debris, their remaining flesh torn in the extraction, lies a reflection of the world’s inhumanity.

Focusing on themes of systemic injustice, and resistance, Counterattack at Thirty is a captivating and timely read—perfect for anyone interested in personal narratives infused with keen social commentary. 

We are living in the advancing era, mended meticulously with dreams and expectations. It is the era of new norms. And yet, a woman asking for the basic human rights will be scrutinised for standing up for herself.

The idea of outsourcing the selection of poems to a fellow poet-publisher Dustin Pickering, lends the already published poems of Kiriti Sengupta another round of robust readership.

In The Message, Coates details several experiences from his travels to Senegal and Palestine, his correspondences with a teacher in South Carolina fighting against a school board’s push to ban books with topics deemed controversial, and his personal takeaways from these events.