fiction review

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A tale of survival, dominance, and self-discovery in colonial Bengal

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.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / I love you; it’s ruining my life

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Sad men behaving badly

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. 

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Of dewdrops and grit

‘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.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A tale of forgetting and remembrance

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.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / ‘Huckleberry Finn’ through the eyes of Jim

Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / All our heroes end up dead

Review of ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ (Sort of Books, 2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / It’s summer, it’s New York, and the girls are dressed up (and broke)

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.

June 28, 2023
June 28, 2023

Home is where the hurt is

This is a beautiful book about a teenager looking for the answers in life, the joys of found family, and the experience of love in its many forms.

June 14, 2023
June 14, 2023

Lovers, liars and lurkers in the library

Hannah's protagonist Freddie is attempting to make progress on her novel by working at the Boston Public Library, when she—along with three of the people she is sharing a table with—are transfixed by the sound of a woman screaming somewhere in the Library.

June 9, 2023
June 9, 2023

Exploring nostalgia over coffee

Although the story doesn’t talk about how this particular cafe became a time-travelling spot to begin with, reading through to the last page made me feel that the café was always there-since the beginning of time.

June 3, 2023
June 3, 2023

Like father, unlike son: Martin Amis’s place in literature

Perhaps Martin Amis’s works do not grab me for the most part because it veers too far away from the humanism of, say, Saul Bellow—a writer Martin greatly admires and has written about extensively.

June 3, 2023
June 3, 2023

Racism and geopolitics in South Africa

Institutional racism in colonies, migration, flawed anti-monarchy sentiments stemming from personal vendettas, and the need for rebellion permeate the lives of these characters.

May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023

Flesh in ruins

It is the disease that maintains the upper hand in the plot. A jarring voice of its own, the toxins spilling across the pages in bold, chaotic words.

May 11, 2023
May 11, 2023

Tough choices, terrifying consequences

A major scientific breakthrough has ensured that boys born with a particular gene can be identified as having the potential to grow into violent men.

April 6, 2023
April 6, 2023

Homegrown heroine

This story, which originally began as a short story, features a headstrong heroine putting her desires above what society expects of her, in order to realise her destiny.

March 16, 2023
March 16, 2023

Can ideology win over desire?

Set in 1990s Dhaka against the backdrop of the military occupation, the novella follows the lives of a young university professor, his wife, and their house help, Phulbanu. The story is narrated entirely from Phulbanu’s perspective. 

March 9, 2023
March 9, 2023

A legacy of women's freedom in art

Schwartz’s narrator speaks in the choral “we”, and like a daisy chain, they connect all these women’s shared yet individual experiences of feeling closed in, being violated, feeling misunderstood by society, until they all shed their names and managed to “escap[e] the century”.