Worth a read this month

THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION

(June 2020)

Sonia Shah,

Bloomsbury

Non-fiction

Why do human beings migrate? And does it disrupt or benefit states and societies? Science journalist Sonia Shah has previously written about diseases in the form of travel books. Now, she traces the movement of humans, plants, and wildlife across history to measure their impact on environmental change, myth-busting the principles of anti-immigration policies.

AKBAR: THE GREAT MUGHAL (June 2020)

Ira Mukhoty, Aleph Book

Company

Non-fiction

Having previously explored women in Indian mythology and the Mughal Empire, Ira Mukhoty, in this latest, offers a 'definitive' biography of Emperor Akbar. She covers his childhood and all that transpired in his 50 year rule—military tactics, abolition of slavery and jiziya (religious tax), his efforts to emancipate women, and more—leaning on current research by art historians.

A BURNING (June 2020)

Megha Majumdar, Knopf

Fiction

A Muslim girl from the slums is blamed for a terrorist attack because of a Facebook comment. A gym teacher tries to climb into a right-wing political party at her expense. But she can be saved by the alibi of someone—a social outcast who dreams of success in the movies.  Author Meghna Majumdar, associate editor at Catapult and an anthropology graduate from Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities, follows in the traditions of Jhumpa Lahiri and Yaa Gyasi, tackling class, corruption and extremism in a debut set in Kolkata.

MINOR DETAIL (May 2020)

Adania Shibli, Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette,

New Directions

Fiction

It is 1949, a year after the Nakba displaced 700,000 people in Palestine. A Bedouin teenager is raped, killed and buried in the desert sand by Israeli soldiers. When Shibli, a writer in present-day Ramallah, discovers this atrocity in a news report, she becomes obsessed with telling the story from the point of view of the victim. The project takes her to the perilous site of the crime in Israel.