Tag: Review


  • From almost the very beginning of this incredibly insightful book into the political meanings of the hijab/niqab (condensed into a veil for ease), we are told by Dr Sahar Ghumkhor:โ€œI refuse to answer the question.โ€ [p.viii] What is the question she is refusing to answer? The one that is perhaps most obviously asked a Muslim…

  • Munnu is a deeply personal tale of the loss of innocence of a young boy, echoing the loss of peace and paradise in a valley that was once called heaven on earth. Munnu is a beautifully drawn graphic novel that illuminates the conflicted land of Kashmir, through a young boyโ€™s childhood. Those who already relished…

  • Written by the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Saud Alsanousiโ€™s Mama Hissa’s Mice is an apocalyptic and caustically funny novel about the power of friendship in a war-torn world. Mama Hissaโ€™s Mice was a banned book in Kuwait, where the book is set, for over four years. Mama Hissa’s Mice,ย published originally in…

  • To tell the truth, on the face of a tyrant, is a brave act. This book is an act of revelation. Gowhar’s book is a result of more than a decade of his journalistic career. Research and his personal experience of Kashmir makes him own the narrative. Authoritative and emotional, Kashmir โ€“ Rage and Reason…

  • โ€œThere are some things that canโ€™t be explained in this life,โ€ Menshiki went on, โ€œand some others that probably shouldnโ€™t be explained. Especially when putting them into words ignores what is most crucial.โ€ ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  โ€”Haruki Murakami,…

  • It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is.ย ย ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย ๏ผLudwig Wittgenstein This book is the…

  • Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them. Abraham Lincoln repeatedly visited the graveyard where his son Willie, who died at the age…

  • The Meadow

    The Meadow tracks a decade-and-a-half old, but still haunting, story. The book is essentially an unravelling of the brutal 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists (two Britons, two Americans, one German and one Norwegian) which, some believe, changed the face of modern terrorism and, in a convoluted kind of way, paved the way for the…

  • โ€œAnything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everythingโ€™s slip-sliding around and thereโ€™s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.โ€ Published in two parts, 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote remains the most influential work of literature from the Spanish…

  • From Narrative to Myth

    Most people encounter Rabiโ€˜a through poetic aphorisms such as the following: โ€œI carry a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other: with these things I am going to set fire to Heaven and put out the flames in Hell so that voyagers to God can rip the veils and see…