historical fiction

INTERVIEW / Uncovering history through storytelling

In conversation with Reem Bassiouney on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, 'Al Halwani', and bridging the cultural gap

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Love, loss, and hope in Tehran

Overnight, the saffron summer afternoons and evenings of dreamy stargazing tumble into a tale of grief, guilt, and pain.

Book Review: Fiction / In search of lost eden

From the beginning we see Benjamin Honey, the patriarch of the island, longing to return to his past, in a garden, the Eden of his childhood where he reminisces about being with a woman who might or might not have been her mother.

THE SHELF / 5 books for readers with an appetite

The Hundred Foot Journey is the story of an immigrant Indian family who sets up a restaurant right in front of a famous French relais and the feud it ensues.

Padmavat: Under the lens of history, politics, and literature

Padmavat, a tale of a mythical queen featuring love, honour, and sacrifice, has captured the imagination of readers and audiences for centuries.

Language can be the ultimate colonial weapon

Despite these heavy themes, Babel remains inherently readable. It is quick to attract the reader’s attention and then hold it captive, making it a very difficult book to put down.

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”.