Review of Mitali Chakravarty’s ‘From Calcutta to Kolkata: A City of Dreams: Poems’ (Hawakal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 2025)
“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.
Mowtushi Mahruba’s Africa in the Bengali Imagination: from Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-73 is a distinctive and pioneering work on the way the continent led to creative writing in English as well as Bengali over the decades
Shahid Alam and I go back a long way, though we had both half-forgotten it until recently. He was two years senior to me at St. Gregory’s High School.
Aptly named Ateet Theke Adhuna: Bangladesher Naari Lekhok, this collection is unlike a conventional anthology. Starting with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the list of writers includes an impressive 66 great authors.
When I picked up Baitullah Quaderee’s 'Bangladesher Shater Dashaker Kabita', it wasn’t particularly out of scholarly curiosity. The book is, by design, a doctoral thesis—its structure conventional, its chapters arranged by academic demand—but what caught my interest was not the format, nor even the topic. It was the author himself.
In Lakshmi’s Secret Diary, Ari Gautier crafts a dazzling, multi-layered narrative that is as whimsical as it is profound.
These stories subtly highlight how even within patriarchal structures, men, too, are shaped, sometimes twisted by the systems they benefit from.
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.
Review of ‘Nexus’ (Random House, 2024)
I was a Twilight girl.
It's almost as if Matthew Perry was destined to write this book.
Being an ardent admirer of K-pop culture, I wonder why I was hitherto unaware of this gem of a book, One Left by Kim Soom, and the excruciatingly painful truth it delineates.
‘Shabnam’ is a dewdrop in Persian. Shabnam (1960) is the name of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s passionate love story that stretches beyond the history of nearly a century ago.
Review of ‘Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia’ (Picador India, 2023) edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Tarana Husain Khan, and Claire Chambers
Review of ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ (Sort of Books, 2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka
Anasru Ishwar written by Kazi Labonno is an impressive work of fiction, shedding light on the deepest gloom pervading the remotest corner of society.
The London Bookshop Affair and The Stationery Shop of Tehran are veritable time-travel portals. They offer a deep look at the political mishaps of the times
A review of ‘Spatial Justice, Contested Governance And Livelihood Challenges In Bangladesh’ (Routledge, 2024) by Lutfun Nahar Lata
