The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

The characters crackle with life, quirky and contradictory, despicable and sympathetic in turns.

To be published by Hachette India in early 2023 and meant to be circulated exclusively in South Asia, the novel is “a story of passion, decadence, infidelity, privilege, identity, and the many confounding faces of love and loss in contemporary Dhaka.

When you go to a book-store, it is often difficult to choose from the plethora of newly released books available. The following list should help when deciding what new books to buy.

Thoughts of a devoted poet

For fans of the Argentinia team, these five books can be a portal to favourite moments in football history. 

The price we pay for the local paper takes advantage of that extra duty, and practically we are stuck with buying low quality local paper with questionable output often.

The allegedly “hand-signed” copies were not individually inscribed.

She remembers the window, A bright envelope opened and gleamed In the dark railway carriage. Its rectangular frame cut back every irrelevant, Decapitated all remainders. Outside an intemperate sky painted everything blue And looked her on the nose.

Writer and academic Elora Shehabuddin has lived in a number of countries and had a fair share of exposure to multicultural environments. Her lived experience must have proved helpful in bringing in a comprehensive perspective to the discussion in Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press 2021; University Press Limited 2022).  

Carving mysterious runes with bones A pentagram etched in my soul Pulling on the blistered sinews Of Desperately unrestrained sins

The doctors told me that I should forget about playing football. But I just had one thing on my mind: I was going to be back on the pitch again and prove everyone wrong. 

Finding himself at the epicentre of the disaster, Abed realised that a large number of deaths (an estimated 500,000) in the “world’s deadliest known tropical cyclone” were not necessarily caused by the natural disaster.

She came out from the cocoon of the accepted designated roles of women and marched forward to live an extraordinary life. 

Ali Imam, the author of more than 600 books, breathed his last on Monday evening in the Bangladesh Medical College Hospital in the capital’s Dhanmondi area.

What moon might mean to you

Bertelsmann will owe Paramount a USD 200 million break-up fee as a result of the transaction falling apart.

With the FIFA World Cup 2022 starting today, tensions run high around the country. Avid football fans have already dawned on their favourite team’s jerseys and hoisted their country’s flags alongside that of Bangladesh’s. The entire world will be glued to their tv screens till a winner emerges to claim the Football World Cup.

The book doesn’t only become a memoir of the writer’s life as a development worker, but also a tribute to the late Sir Abed and his magnanimity as a human being and a visionary. 

She has been coming to this hotel for the last 28 years, ever since her mother died, and has chosen to stay in the exact same room as she does every year. She uses the same road from the hotel to travel to her mother’s resting place and buys flowers from the same African woman.

Shamim Reza's poetry is defined by an ethical and religious soul, an undoubtedly attribute of the legendary mystics of India. Gods not only summon us to sing to them, but they also ask us to share such ethics where love and sensuality are fused. That is, precisely, the great contribution of the Sufis and the Baüls. The poetry and artistic language proposed by Reza expresses the affections of a mystical land, its gods, its love for the sacred word and the sacred life that is the human life. Love is a way of expressing feelings, but also is a mechanism of philosophical and poetic knowledge. Love is a way of life: Poetry and music thus constitute an ethical way of living in community.