Whether delving into chunky historical narratives or listening to short story podcasts, we’ve all been approaching reading differently during lockdown. Our reading habits can take us back in time, allow us to examine our present, or give us hope for the future. In time for the May bank holiday weekend, the Literature team shares what they’ve been reading lately. You People by Nikita LalwaniNikita Lalwani's You People follows Nia, a 19-year-old British-Indian girl, and Shan, a Tamil refugee, who work at a London pizzeria and are both in thrall – in different ways – to the restaurant's enigmatic manager Tuli. Initially, Nia and Shan don't have much in common, and their differing views of Tuli reflect this. Nia wants to escape her troubled family, while Shan longs to bring his wife and child to the UK; Nia, having been sent down from Oxford, wants to escape the bonds of the establishment, while Shan longs for Britain's elite to grant him indefinite leave to remain. To Nia, Tuli is mercurial and charming, glimpsed offering deals and generous loans; from Shan's perspective, he's to be courted and obeyed, able to use his influence and wealth to bring Shan's family to safety.Things change when Nia voluntarily enters a world that Shan can’t escape, and You People uses a gripping, thriller-like structure to reflect this. But even as the jaws of the trap close around them, and the protagonists rely on quick thinking and deduction to survive, the novel creates a larger tension from... Continue reading at 'British Council global'
[ British Council global | 2020-05-07 13:58:54 UTC ]
“Then the Fish Swallowed Him,” the first novel in English by the Iranian-born Amir Ahmadi Arian, makes for unnerving reading. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-03-24 09:00:00 UTC ]
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Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has held the UK Official Top 50 number one spot for a third week running, selling 30,280 copies through Nielsen BookScan's TCM. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-23 20:03:58 UTC ]
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Interviews Tiffany Hawk In 2012, at sixteen years old, Joshua Wong and the pro-democracy student group he founded took on the Hong Kong government, mobilized more than one hundred thousand student protesters, and surprised the world by successfully... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-03-23 16:00:04 UTC ]
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The sought-after first novel by former blogger Clare Pooley exposes the need for connection in the age of social media Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-20 07:25:26 UTC ]
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A reader who fell out of love with short story collections ponders how best to make reading short stories part of the routine again. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-03-18 10:39:38 UTC ]
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Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has claimed the UK Official Top 50 number one spot for a second week running. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-17 11:08:45 UTC ]
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“The Mountains Sing,” the first novel in English by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai, imagines her country’s traumatic 20th century through the stories of three generations of women. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-03-17 09:00:13 UTC ]
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BOTH JACK MILES’S Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story and Karen Armstrong’s The Lost Art of Scripture are contributions — powerful in their own ways — to the comparative study of religion. Miles was general editor to the Norton Anthology of World Religions, and his new book — more of a... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-03-16 12:30:52 UTC ]
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My mother, Lilian Mohin, who has died aged 81, was a co-founder in the 1970s of the London-based feminist publishing house Onlywomen Press, for which she wrote and edited works of literature and poetry. Lilian set up Onlywomen Press in 1974 with Sheila Shulman and Deborah Hart – and was a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-03-13 16:34:45 UTC ]
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Ken Liu, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of more acclaimed SFF short stories than you can shake a futuristic stick at, will soon be bringing his expansive imagination to the small screen. As Publishers Marketplace announced earlier today, AMC has acquired the rights to the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-13 14:30:21 UTC ]
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Eight new titles have flocked into the Bookstat E-Book top 10 for the week ending 7th March, with Daisy Pearce’s The Silence in the number one spot. Of course, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light also broke into the chart, hitting fourth place with an estimated 20,114 units sold. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-13 05:16:17 UTC ]
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Boy do we need it. Lady Gaga and her organization, the Born This Way Foundation, have announced that they’ll be publishing an anthology later this year called Channel Kindness: Stories of Kindness and Community. All of the anthology’s authors are contributors to the Born This Way Channel... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-12 19:33:17 UTC ]
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It’s been a day since the publication of The Mirror and the Light—the final installment of Hilary Mantel’s celebrated trilogy about Tudor England, starring the enigmatic Thomas Cromwell—so you’ve already blazed through it, right? Well, whether you have already or you’re about to, once you’ve... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-11 08:55:24 UTC ]
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Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has held the Amazon Charts' Most-Sold: Fiction top spot for a second week, the same week the eagerly awaited title sold 95,141 copies across all print editions through Nielsen BookScan's TCM. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-10 16:43:19 UTC ]
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Mantel’s first two installments, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both won the Booker Prize. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-03-10 15:47:07 UTC ]
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Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has gone straight into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot in its first three days on sale, selling 95,141 copies for £1.55m across all editions. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-09 23:55:32 UTC ]
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How J. Edgar Hoover used the power of libraries for (gasp!) evil. | Lit Hub History “Mechanical travel blunts our sense of the world.” On the reverie and detachment of the American road trip. | Lit Hub Travel On the magic sentences of Lauren Groff, creating action without verbs. | Lit... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-07 12:30:11 UTC ]
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Mankell’s 1972 book, “The Rock Blaster,” now available in English, explores the struggles of a working-class man. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-03-05 17:00:00 UTC ]
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After an eight-year wait, Hilary Mantel’s third Cromwell book finally hit bookshelves this week, hailed by critics as a triumphant finale to what Fourth Estate has called an “extraordinary journey” for both publisher and author. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-05 02:20:11 UTC ]
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Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has illuminated the Amazon Charts a week ahead of publication, with the final title in the Cromwell trilogy rising 10 places to claim the Most-Sold: Fiction number one. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-04 04:41:46 UTC ]
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