Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.
Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.
In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime.
I was a Twilight girl.
‘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.
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.
Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.
Review of ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ (Sort of Books, 2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka
Happy Hour greeted me like a warm hug. This is definitely one of the sweetest books I’ve read this year, and possibly one of the sweetest books I will ever read.
A visit to any bookshop today will attest to the reading public’s fascination with crime (and criminals).
Reading Rahad Abir’s Bengal Hound, despite the novel being written in English, felt a lot like reading in Bangla. While no two languages can ever truly be compared, there is much to be said about seeing Bangla and Bangladesh through an English language lens.
It’s a truism to say that modern life is complicated, but even a couple of decades ago, it would have been hard to predict the things we are dealing with today.
There is more squash in the book than most readers will take a liking to, but the game sometimes works as a metaphor for the bigger picture.
Rarely does a book arrive, a debut no less, that feels as inventive and accomplished as Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Her novel is built on the crossroads of interpretation and ownership, of the power of language and of those privileged enough to reclaim it.
By visually capturing the characters, landscapes, and action scenes, the graphic novels enhance the reading experience and offer a fresh perspective on the beloved story.
I first came across Anastasia Ryan’s work through my Instagram wanderings and was instantly intrigued by the sound of her recently released novel. Not least by its title, You Should Smile More.
There is a sense of inexorable catharsis, and dare I say— spirituality—when the protagonists begin their journey into one another since they alone embody the ideas and predicaments of the text.
Given the background of the main characters, Bhooter Agun has a diverse narrative and depicts a world of diverging cultures, traditions, customs, and practices.
When DC Clements misses, by just a few hours, the opportunity to recover the abducted Kylie—who was being held prisoner by an unknown captor in the initial period after she disappeared—the police officer becomes obsessed with finding out what actually happened to the missing woman.
