Moving on from the theme of communication examined in her last novel, Bitter Orange Tree, International Booker-prize winner Jokha Alharthi turns her exacting focus and lyrical style to marriage and motherhood in contemporary Oman. Sensitively translated to reflect Alharthi’s ability to switch seamlessly between the different voices of her two central characters, one pragmatic, one…
Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. Ashiya is a city about two hours east of her childhood home by the brand new shinkansen.
Among the epic and stories of great battle, the Mahabharata has certain sections where smaller stories and myths exist to illustrate the larger point about origins of something or explain why things are the way they are. Some characters might seem familiar from other myths or the fables bring to mind other fable texts such…
The island of Sri Lanka resembles a teardrop, also the title of Sue Amos’s latest novel, set in 1953 when the country was still called Ceylon. Teardrop is a murder mystery that weaves in both folklore and the beauty of the island.
Indian literature has tended to mythologize Delhi as a majestic and contentious land, filled with the rebellious fervor of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and the soul of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi. Prayaag Akbar’s newest novel, Mother India, revitalizes the city by placing it at the centre of contemporary issues, namely the growing use of social…
Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel,…
Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
In Sheela Tomy’s new novel, the foreign observer of Israel and Palestine is not the archetypal Westerner, but a middle-aged Indian woman. Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S, Do Not Ask The River Her Name weaves the past and future into a blood-filled present to tell an emotional and urgent tale.
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), aka “Dukhu Mia” and known as the “rebel poet” of the Bengalis, was born in Churulia, a village in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. A litterateur, lyricist, revolutionary, communist and freedom fighter, he was declared the national poet of Bangladesh in 1987. These Collected Short Stories are a joint endeavour…
In an interview subsequent to the publication of the translation into English of Thuận’s novel, Chinatown, interviewer Phuong Anh observes that the author’s main characters are searching for an answer to a question that ultimately drives that novel.
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers…
Vikas Swarup is interested in narrative spectacle. His famous novel, Q & A, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, which enthralled a primarily Western audience who had never seen the filth and grit of Mumbai slum life before. The film was a contested breakthrough; some Indians cynically gawked at the exoticised melodrama of…
Despite being full of lively characters, the most vibrant personality in Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo might be the city itself. Tokyo here is a fascinating hybrid gleaned from the novel’s ten individual perspectives, and the introduction of each new set of eyes reveals, piece by piece, a city that is as multifaceted as it is…
It’s the early 2000s in Bombay. The air is damp, the streets are crowded, and hedonism abounds. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, published long after the Betty Trask-winning A Speck of Coal Dust. It’s a propulsive, character-focused study of the growth of Indian liberalism that unwittingly sets a middle-aged woman, Maya, down a…
Paul Bevan is the one of the most prominent scholars of early 20th-century Shanghai and it’s thanks to him that English language readers have learned of the contributions of Chinese illustrators, writers, publishers and other artists in late-Qing and Republican-era Shanghai. A few years ago, he translated a novel titled The Adventures of Ma Suzhen:…