I have always loved reading about individuals and the ways they behave in extraordinary or unusual circumstances. Stories that are about a person growing up and coming to an understanding that the world around them is deeply flawed, and that they themselves are patched-up, imperfect creatures, fascinate me. I find myself observing people and the words they say. Those are the kinds of stories I write, about regular people stumbling along and discovering some truths about themselves.
The protagonist is a Pakistani girl moving from the urban city of Rawalpindi to a rural city in the US, as part of a program that places students abroad for a year in high school.
There were so many instances when I completely understood Hira, the way she talked about the US, about growing up in Pakistan, about language. Her adjusting to life far from home is complicated by her illness, a disease the perception of which further makes us question our prejudices about a place and its people.
'Prose that dances with charge and potency' LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
WINNER OF A 2023 ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE
On a year-long exchange programme, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap the bustle of urban Pakistan for church and volleyball practice in rural Oregon.
Stuck between two worlds, her experience of America is sometimes freeing, sometimes painful, often quite painful. And while she faces racism and Islamophobia, she also makes new friends and has her first kiss.
But when her new life is blown apart by a shocking health crisis, Hira's sense of belonging is overturned once…
Bunny is an American teenager in Azerbaijan. Her father is a diplomat. She grows up in a world where oil is everything, listening to the language of the adults around her as some want their share of the profits reaped by this energy source while (a few) others point out the inequities in this industry and its potential long-term effects on the world.
What is fascinating as well is how she herself becomes part of this same world when she is an adult, almost as if she cannot help but be subsumed by the vast structure of the oil industry.
“A masterpiece of misdirection.” ―Geraldine Brooks
“Mobility is a truly gripping coming-of-age story about navigating a world of corporate greed that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and politically incisive.” ―Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor
Bunny Glenn believes in climate change. But she also likes to get paid.
The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion…
A girl who grows up during The Troubles in Northern Ireland and is harassed by a man who comes to be known as Milkman – this is psychological terror as well as the already-present threat to one’s safety in extraordinarily difficult times.
Anna Burns makes everyday behaviors seem political, brilliantly creating an atmosphere of instability and mistrust while the protagonist, who remains unnamed, wants to cocoon herself from The Troubles. This book is an incredible read.
Liberty fabric covered editions bring classics from the Faber backlist together with important modern titles, putting them in conversation and celebrating both the history and the future of Faber & Faber.
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and…
Franny and Zooey are the two youngest siblings in the Glass family. Originally, “Franny” was published as a short story and “Zooey” as a novella, both of them being published later in one book.
In “Franny”, the protagonist visits her college boyfriend who speaks about his experiences in great detail. But Franny increasingly becomes disenchanted with the ideals of accomplishment he speaks about.
The way “Zooey” opens is memorable: he is reading a letter from his brother Buddy who has written about their eldest brother Seymour’s suicide many years ago. Meanwhile, Franny has entered a state of distress. The book then focuses on Zooey trying to help her.
I love that the story centers around these siblings, living and dead and away, and that despite past tragedies there is hope.
"Perhaps the best book by the foremost stylist of his generation" (New York Times), J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey collects two works of fiction about the Glass family originally published in The New Yorker.
"Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It…
This story about a girl and her sister growing up under the care of different people, one after the other.
They face a series of abandonments. The matter of housekeeping, then, is not only about the house they live in, but about maintaining a sense of spirituality to keep one anchored despite so much loss. The voice of the narrator moved me immensely, as she grows up clouded in a certain innocence, not knowing who from this small group of people in her house and life will be the next to leave.
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized…
In the rural town in Pakistan where Baadal grows up, children are named like talismans to sustain life and ward off unhappiness. But as Baadal grows into adulthood, abundance seems impossibly far away. As his parents’ marriage reaches a breaking point, the only comfort Baadal can afford is a budding kinship with Meena, a divorced older woman he meets on the banks of the drying river.
Told in rotating perspectives spanning from 1966 to 1998, The River, the Town is an intimate portrait of a family unraveling in the throes of indigence, and a tribute to the wounded love that keeps them tethered to each other.
My wife suggested we try scuba diving while on holiday in Grand Cayman. We were already falling in love with the island, and the incredible experience underwater opened a whole new world to us. From that moment on, our yearly travels changed completely. Our destination choices were now based upon diving opportunities. That was twenty years ago. Today, I’m a certified divemaster with dives all over the US (including Hawaii), the Caribbean (including Cuba), Australia, and even Iceland. Throw in my sense of adventure as a former race car driver, motorcycle rider, and outdoor adventurer, and I had plenty of personal experiences to create the AJ Bailey series.
Readers who enjoy police procedurals with an offbeat main character and fascinating locations will love this thriller.
One missing girl. Two lives on the line. Four treacherous challenges.
Nora Sommer's first case for the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service is one she'll never forget... if she survives. When the daughter of a wealthy businessman is taken, Nora is first on the scene and unwittingly 'chosen' by the kidnapper.
With the crime live-streamed across the internet, the eyes of the world are upon her as she faces a sequence of difficult challenges with the life of the kidnapped girl hanging on…
One missing girl. Two lives on the line. Four treacherous challenges.
Nora Sommer's first case for the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service is one she'll never forget - if she survives.
When the daughter of a wealthy businessman is taken, Nora is first on the scene and unwittingly 'chosen' by the kidnapper. With the crime live-streamed across the internet, the eyes of the world are upon her as she faces a sequence of difficult challenges with the life of the kidnapped girl hanging on Nora's success - or failure.
Deadly Sommer is the thrilling first book in the Nora Sommer…
