There are few pleasures in the life of a Bangali that come close to the sheer delight of basking in the rare but sweet Sun on a winter morning on the balcony, accompanied by the aroma of a cup of tea,

In a near-perfect echo of today’s world, Nobel Prize-winning Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Bergher King (Seagull Books, 2020) is stuffed breathless with metaphors, innuendoes, and anecdotes as it satirises US President Donald Trump.

This is a must-read book for anyone worried about the vulnerability of democracy in our time and the rise of authoritarian governments everywhere.

Four-year-old Sharanyo was bored from the lengthy lockdown during the pandemic. He could not go to school, parks, or shops and his day-to-day activities became mundane. He no longer enjoyed eating, showering, or going to bed at the right time. His father Shuvashish had to find found a solution. Having just returned to his son after a yearlong study leave in the UK, Shuvashish started creating stories to keep Sharanyo busy during dinner and bedtime. Soon, Sharanyo started chiming in, visualizing how the characters would look, how the stories would end.

Edward Said is one of only a handful of intellectuals who can truly be said to have educated and influenced multiple generations on the Palestinian cause and the different prisms of thought through which we now look at literature, art, and history. In many ways, we are the heirs of the man who popularised the term, “Orientalism”; a man who championed the voices and struggles of the Global South in the Anglo-American sphere.

If you thought the unapologetically outspoken Starr Carter from The Hate U Give (Balzer + Bray, 2017) was a force to be reckoned with, it’s time you met the man who raised her to be so: Maverick Carter.

Prolific writer Rabeya Khatun, a recipient of the Bangla Academy Literary Award 1973, Ekushey Padak 1993, and the Independence Day Award 2017, passed away on January 3, 2021 after suffering from a long period of health complications.

The epigraph of The Old Drift (Hogarth Press, 2020), taken from Vigil’s The Aeneid, briefly narrates the story of a diverse civilisation thriving on the banks of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that “somnolently” drifts past a “populous throng” of spirits.

Asha Ray is a coder who, upon reconnecting with a high school love interest, abandons her PhD program to write a new algorithm for an exclusive tech firm.

Land—its ownership, its deep history, its uses and abuses—forms the subject of best-selling historian Simon Winchester’s new book,

Out of all the books that I had to speed through for work this year, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind was an exception.

As the final pages of 2020 flick away, a lot of us find ourselves cracking open our diaries, or signing into our reading apps to log in the last few books of the year.

We asked some of the prominent writers and academics from Bangladesh about the books they most enjoyed in 2020. Some of them confessed that the year has been too difficult to find much time for reading.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo is a beautiful rendition of the intertwining lives of people in modern Britain. Twelve people, most of whom are women, each dedicated a chapter, are seen in the best and worst moments of their lives.

In August 2017, the Myanmar military perpetrated a genocide on the Rohingyas, an ethnic group residing in Northern Rakhine. Large numbers of Rohingyas were killed,

Is it just us, or do the cold winds of December make you want to bring down your favourite childhood stories, classics hardcovers, and delicious thrillers from your shelves too?

It is a truth universally acknowledged by her many fans that Jane Austen’s sharp wit, complex characters, subtle social reproach, and tantalising storytelling are almost unparalleled.

The mind of ten-year-old Jas—the narrator of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s 2020 International Booker Prize-winning The Discomfort of Evening (Faber Books,

A collection of our freedom's history.

Tarashankar Bandopadhyay 1971 (Daily Star Books,2015) was initially supposed to be published as two separate novellas, Shutpar Tapashya and Ekti Kalo Meyer Kahini,