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Passing
A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is ‘cancelled’ for denying her whiteness. A Victorian explorer disguises himself as a Muslim in Arabia’s forbidden holy city. A trans man claiming to have been assigned male at birth is exposed and murdered by bigots in 1993. Today, Japanese untouchables leave home and change their name. All of them have ‘passed’, performing or claiming an identity that society hasn’t assigned or recognised as theirs. For as long as we’ve drawn lines describing ourselves and each other, people have naturally fallen or deliberately stepped between them. What do their stories—in life and in art—tell us about the changing meanings of identity? About our need for labels, despite their obvious limitations? Lipika Pelham reflects on tales of fluidity and transformation, including her own. From Pope Joan to Parasite, Brazil to Bangladesh, London to Liberia, Passing is a fascinating, timely history of the self.
The Unlikely Settler
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen by an outsider who craves to make sense of herself, her marriage, and the city she lives in The Unlikely Settler is none other than a young Bengali journalist who moves to Jerusalem with her English-Jewish husband and two children. He speaks Arabic and is an arch believer in the peace process; she leaves her career behind to follow his dream. Jerusalem propels Pelham into a world where freedom from tribal allegiance is a challenging prospect. From the school you choose for your children to the wine you buy, you take sides at every turn. Pelham’s complicated relationship with her husband, Leo, is as emotive as the city she lives in, as full of energy, pain, and contradictions. As she tries to navigate the complexities and absurdities of daily life in Jerusalem, often with hilarious results, Pelham achieves deep insights into the respective woes and guilt of her Palestinian and Israeli friends. Her intelligent analysis suggests a very different approach to a potential resolution of the conflict.
Jerusalem on the Amstel
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan "carnival of nations:" French Huguenots, North African merchants, Spanish Moriscos--and Iberian New Christians, formerly Jewish families forcibly converted to Catholicism, now fleeing the Inquisition and rediscovering their ancestral faith. This is the extraordinary tale of Amsterdam's prosperous Sephardi community during the Dutch Golden Age. Trading, writing, publishing, staging plays and being painted by Rembrandt, this Nação (Nation) of formerly wandering Jews not only settled but thrived, enjoying high status and unparalleled freedom. At a time when Dutch Catholics were repressed and Jews elsewhere were confined to the ghetto, this comm...
Good Husbandry
From the celebrated author of the beloved bestseller The Dirty Life, a “beguiling memoir about the simple life” (Elle), Kristin Kimball describes the delicious highs and sometimes excruciating lows of life on Essex Farm—a 500-acre farm that produces a full diet for a community of 250 people. The Dirty Life chronicled Kimball’s move from New York City to 500 acres near Lake Champlain where she started a new farm with her partner, Mark. In Good Husbandry, she reveals what happened over the next five years at Essex Farm. Farming has many ups and downs, and the middle years were hard for the Kimballs. Mark got injured, the weather turned against them, and the farm faced financial pressur...
The Last Migration
"An extraordinary novel... as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read" Emily St. John Mandel "An adventure of a wilder sort" Vogue US A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny's life begin to unspool. A daughter's yearning search for her mother...
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
Finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History "A luminous biography." —Rafia Zakaria, Guardian Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire. Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, leading troops into battle, signing imperial orders, and astutely handling matters of the state. Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire. In Empress, Nur Jahan finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.
Daughter of the Agunmukha
How does a girl from a tiny Bangladeshi island end up reading Tagore, Marx and de Beauvoir, and becoming a feminist activist? How does she navigate different cultures and religions, and patriarchal society? Daughter of the Agunmukha is the riveting personal history of Noorjahan Bose, born in 1938 in present-day Bangladesh to a Muslim farming family, near the mouth of the ferocious River Agunmukha--Fire Mouth River. Abused by male relatives and raised by a mother who was herself married at just 7 years old, Noorjahan struggled for her education and autonomy against the painful backdrop of partition, and under the joyful, creative care of her mother. Mentored by local activists, she found her ...
The Invisible Muslim
"Medina Tenour Whiteman stands at the margins of whiteness and Islam. An Anglo-American born to Sufi converts, she feels perennially out of place--not fully at home in Western or Muslim cultures. In this searingly honest memoir, Whiteman contemplates what it means to be an invisible Muslim, examining the pernicious effects of white Muslim privilege and exploring what Muslim identity can mean the world over--in lands of religious diversity and cultural insularity, from Andalusia, Bosnia and Turkey to Zanzibar, India and Iran. Through her travels, she unearths experiences familiar to both Western Muslims and anyone of mixed heritage: a life-long search for belonging and the joys and crises of inhabiting more than one identity."--Dust jacket flap.
I Still Dream
‘The best fictional treatment of the possibilities and horrors of artificial intelligence that I’ve read’ Guardian In 1997 Laura Bow invented Organon, a rudimentary artificial intelligence.
Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977) is undoubtedly one of the most widely acclaimed African writers of the twenty-first century. Best known for her insightful fiction, viral TED talks, and essays on feminism, she is also an outspoken intellectual. As she puts it in an interview with Lia Grainger, in her characteristically straightforward style: “I have things to say and I’ll say them.” Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the first collection of interviews with the writer. Covering fifteen years of conversations, the interviews start with the publication of Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), and end in late 2018, by which time Adichie had become o...
