Beyond the celebration of Eid, this book also explores themes of love, loss, and the grief of spending a special occasion without a loved one.

Review of ‘Apni Ki Alien Dekhte Chan?’ (Afsar Brothers, 2024) by Wasif Noor

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977). 

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

Review of ‘Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood’ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1986) by Anthony Mascarenhas

Review of ‘Renegotiating Patriarchy’ (LSE Press, 2024) by Naila Kabeer

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.

Proverbs, short and profound, often sum up wisdom passed down through generations. Bangla, one of the world’s most spoken languages, is rich with such gems. One such saying in the language—”manush ki bolbe?”—is central to Intimacies of Violence, a debut book by Dr Nadine Shaanta Murshid, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.

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

Folk Melody of Bangladesh: An Anthology of Bangladesh Folk Music in Standard Notation is a music anthology that compiles 204 carefully chosen folk songs of Bangladesh that date from the 16th century.

The city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, was once the breeding hotspot of the 20th century’s greatest writers, scientists, scholars, and activists.

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. 

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