This captivating and enlightening memoir of a Muslim girl growing up in 1970s and 1980s Britain begins in the future, as the author has been captured and taken to the Torture Room of the police headquarters in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. Malik was employed by Channel 4 in Britain, and visited Bangladesh to film a story about …
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Everyone has a dating horror story—an annoying fix-up, a disastrous dinner, or an awkward lack of conversational points. In I Want to Get Married!, Ghada Abdel Aal, an Egyptian woman quickly approaching "old maid" status, shares her quest to find a husband, showing that while marriage customs may differ across the world, dating is a universally horrible experience.
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One of the things I look for in a novel is a sense of place, the ability of an author to transport me across the world and set me down in a setting very different from my own. I do not just want descriptions of what a town or city looks like; I want to understand the place—its customs, its people, its smells and tastes. Reading should be a form of travel …
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The most interesting aspect of this book is not that it is a romantic tale of two teenage girls who are lovers struggling to stay together despite huge class and wealth differences. Nor is it the choice of the family dog, Serafín, as a narrator for the events. What makes The Fish Child interesting is &hellip
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Most of us know the disorientation of travel to a country with a different language and customs. The simplest daily activities can become so difficult—where will we eat? How do we look for the bathroom? Reading Renee Gladman's intriguing novella Event Factory redoubles that feeling, in the story of a traveler whose experiences and behavior have an unusual orientation to everyday logic.
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