Here are 100 books that Murder at the Mushaira fans have personally recommended if you like
Murder at the Mushaira.
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I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
You saw this rec coming, right? Although this is a novel rather than a straight history, Eco’s story is probably the one that started me on my own nerdy path to book history and book sleuthing. I read it as an impressionable freshman in college, and its descriptions of monastic manuscripts imprinted themselves on me before I ever saw an example of an illuminated book in the flesh.
Murder, medieval abbeys, and old musty books… what’s not to love? In fact, I’m going to take my own advice and reread this one right now—for pure nostalgia and enjoyment.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
I'm a retired historian of early Islam and writer of historical fiction set in medieval Iraq, Turkic, and Persian lands. I write and love to read novels that “do history.” In other words, historical fiction that unravels the tangles of history through the lives of its characters, especially when told from the perspectives of those upon whom elite power is wielded. My selections are written by authors who speak from an informed position, either as academic or lay historians, those with a stake in that history, or, like me, both, and include major press, small press, and self-published works and represent the histories of West Africa, Europe, Central and West Asia, and South Asia.
Segu
may begin with a lone white explorer gazing across a river at the Bambara
people, but this novel turns away from him to those whose world will be irrevocably
changed as colonialism and Christianity, Muslim expansionism, and the horrific
trade in human beings irrevocably changes the course of African lives. Condé
turns an unblinking eye on the Traore family as they break under the weight of
these civilizational pressures. Traditional ways of life turn brutal and
desperate—women especially feel the brunt of an unstable world—and sons abandon
the family for enemies or are kidnapped and enslaved. Each storyline in this
famed epic cuts straight into the political and social complexities of that
time and exposes its players to uncompromising account.
'Maryse Conde is an extraordinary storyteller who brings the history of an African kingdom alive as vividly as if it existed today. . . This is a great novel: unputdownable and unforgettable' Bernardine Evaristo
Winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature 2018
The bestselling epic novel of family, treachery, rivalry, religious fervour and the turbulent fate of a royal African dynasty
It is 1797 and the African kingdom of Segu, born of blood and violence, is at the height of its power. Yet Dousika Traore, the king's most trusted advisor, feels nothing but dread. Change is coming. From the…
I'm a retired historian of early Islam and writer of historical fiction set in medieval Iraq, Turkic, and Persian lands. I write and love to read novels that “do history.” In other words, historical fiction that unravels the tangles of history through the lives of its characters, especially when told from the perspectives of those upon whom elite power is wielded. My selections are written by authors who speak from an informed position, either as academic or lay historians, those with a stake in that history, or, like me, both, and include major press, small press, and self-published works and represent the histories of West Africa, Europe, Central and West Asia, and South Asia.
The magnificence
of the first in the Amalgant series is the immersive
reconstruction of Mongol social, political, and religious worlds, as well as the
lives of its people. Hammond resistantly reads histories produced by hostile
cultures, instead privileging the earliest and most comprehensive Mongol
tellings of their own lives, The
Secret History of the Mongols. This is no dry historical account of
cultural norms, steppe relations, or material artifacts, but an intimate and
humane telling of the personal tragedies and struggles that would change the
world as the war-orphaned Temujin grows to be the man we know as Chenggiz Khan.
Mother Hoelun was never ashamed or embarrassed by their hardships. When Jochi wore a dog’s pelt for a cloak, because they had no fleeces and no felt and had to trade for hides and dog was cheap, none of the children felt a sense of indignity. Indignity was alien to her.The Mongols are a people of orphans. A disastrous battle with China has left wives without husbands, children without fathers. Temujin is one of these children, impoverished by the heavy tribute China has punished them with, in danger of forgetting what a Mongol stands for. Worse, Temujin's the subject of…
I'm a retired historian of early Islam and writer of historical fiction set in medieval Iraq, Turkic, and Persian lands. I write and love to read novels that “do history.” In other words, historical fiction that unravels the tangles of history through the lives of its characters, especially when told from the perspectives of those upon whom elite power is wielded. My selections are written by authors who speak from an informed position, either as academic or lay historians, those with a stake in that history, or, like me, both, and include major press, small press, and self-published works and represent the histories of West Africa, Europe, Central and West Asia, and South Asia.
This riveting
Young Adult novel sets the action on a stage in which “East” and “West” are not divided as typically
imagined, but intertwined economically, politically, and culturally. Moses’
staff has been stolen from Topkapi Place and a team of Ottoman janissaries is
sent on a mission through Italy and England to recover it. The team is made of
free and formerly enslaved men and women hailing from rising empires and those
lost. Their struggles offer a searing account of the Ottoman, West and North
African, and European dependence on the trade of enslaved human beings. And
while the theft of the staff of Moses may seem fanciful, its possession confers
imperial power and thus is the perfect object to ask from who was it truly
stolen and to whom should it be returned.
A small undercover unit of hand-picked, trusted warriors is assembled to track down the thieves who have stolen the Staff held by Moses as he parted the Red Sea. They are the `Ruzgar' - the `Wind' - and like the wind, they travel silently and unseen. Awa, the studious daughter of a noble family from the Songhai Empire in West Africa, was kidnapped and enslaved by Moroccans after the disastrous Battle of Tondibi. Awa is a whirling and deadly force when she has a scimitar in her hand. Will, who was snatched from his home in London at the age…
Suspense thrillers were staple “reading food” in my college and young adult days, and my love for them continues. I always craved thrillers that are based on WWII, the Cold War, and secret scientific advances and that offered fresh historical perspectives and dared to challenge popular narratives while delighting the readers with dexterously woven fictional tales. And then, most importantly, it is the feeling the author has conducted genuine, painstaking research bringing out captivating, reasoned nuggets of history that I find most satisfying.
I wonder if anyone ever penned a book weaving together the American Revolution, the East India Company, and the British rule over India. Leena Bhatnagar has done it in this masterful debut thriller.
I was amazed at the incredible facets of the history of the epochal Boston Tea Party Bhatnagar rendered in this story of a staunch, gritty American woman caught in a predicament that might threaten and weaken the revolution itself.
Leading up to the Boston Tea Party, The Tea Merchant is the unexpected story of a city on the brink of revolution and the hidden threats the British East India Company brings from Bengal to the American colonies.
Boston, 1773 - The city is restless, torn between loyalty to England and a rising independent spirit. Caught uncomfortably in the middle, Constance Pruitt is the governor's cousin and a widowed tea merchant who struggles to sustain her business. Her family would prefer she relinquish any notion of liberty and settle down—preferably with a husband—but Constance turns to smuggling for the Sons…
I'm a historian of global capitalism and South Asia, writing about corporations as they are and how they could be. I've looked at India with the eyes of an outsider, drawing on my experiences growing up in 1990s Eastern Europe during a time of political upheaval and shock privatizations as the old communist order crumbled. Having witnessed the rise of a new class of monopolists and oligarchs in its stead, I became interested in the many different ways capitalists exercise power in society over time and around the world, and how we as ordinary citizens relate to them. I'm now interested in thinkers, activists, and entrepreneurs who have tried to experiment with alternatives.
There is no better book for understanding India’s family businesses in a broader social and political context than this sprawling, powerful novel. Preti Taneja retells and reworks Shakespeare’s King Lear as three sisters (and an illegitimate son) fight over the inheritance of a massive company that makes everything from textiles to cars (echoes of the Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis, but also of the East India Company as the subcontinent’s original corporate sovereign). Taneja touches on all the big issues, including gender, caste, climate, and Kashmir, without ever being preachy. It is a long and sometimes challenging read, but always rewarding. I may be biased given the subject matter, but this is the century’s Great Indian Novel—a worthy successor to the likes of Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, and Sacred Games.
When a billionaire hotelier and political operator attempts to pit his three daughters against one another, a brutal struggle for primacy begins in this modern-day take on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Set in contemporary India, where rich men are gods while farmers starve and water is fast running out, We That Are Young is a story about power, status, and the love of a megalomaniac father. A searing exploration of human fallibility, Preti Taneja’s remarkable novel reveals the fragility of the human heart—and its inevitable breaking point.
I’m a science fiction and fantasy novelist and editor. I’m also a corporate lawyer and mergers and acquisitions consultant. I have a passion for trade, in history, games, literature, and even real life. I fear that we have far too much art glorifying killers and bullies, and I think the future will be built, as the past has been, by people who are willing to explore, meet other cultures, get to know them, and work to find deals that will benefit everyone involved.
This omnibus collects eleven short stories about space merchant Nicholas Van Rijn. Van Rijn (no coincidence that he’s Dutch) is literate, clever, eccentric in speech, archaic in dress, and occasionally valiant in battle – but he’d much rather trade than fight, and although he describes trade as “swindling each other,” he characteristically strikes deals that benefit all parties.
Van Rijn’s trade-in spices (he is CEO of the Solar Spice and Liquors Company) is a callout to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The great early modern companies (and specifically, the British East India Company) are one of the inspirations in my book: they founded some fortunes and give to startling adventure stories, but the contradictions inherent in their nature also led to corruption and oppression.
Follow the exploits of Nicholas Van Rijn, one of Science Fiction's most
popular characters, as told by Science Fiction's Grand Master, Poul Anderson, in
Volume 1 in the Complete Technic Civilization Series.
I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.
A wonderful book on how techniques of mapping were central to the construction of both the empire and of an emerging idea of “India” as a coherent space. I love the way it clearly lays out how mapping is never simply an innocent process of measuring or describing something that exists out in the world, but is always a process of constructing that reality. And it is an essential part of the history of India, as well as the British empire.
In this history of the British surveys of India, focusing especially on the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) undertaken by the British East India Company, the author relates how imperial Britain employed modern scientific survey techniques not only to create and define the spacial inmage of its Indian empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities as triumphs of liberal, rational science bringing "Civilisation" to irrational, mystical and despotic Indians. The reshaping of cartographic technologies in Europe into their modern form played a key role in the use of the GTS as an instrument of British cartographic control over India. In…
My father hails from India, where my first book became a national bestseller when I was 17. My co-author Thomas Locke has written over a dozen thrillers and even more adventure novels. We are both fascinated by India as a land of endless contrasts. From its cuisine and customs to the diverse people and landscape, India can be overwhelming, but never boring. The ancient backdrop of beautiful buildings and interwoven histories whisper secrets and beckon for adventure. Both of us have visited over 40 countries and enjoy reading and writing about multicultural characters. Especially when they want to conquer or save the world!
I love a Sherlock and Watson kind of relationship, and this one fit the early days of the British Raj perfectly. Two Brits in the employ of the East India Trading company who could not be more different. Avery is very much part of the system and eager to please. His mysterious guide, Jeremiah Blake, is critical of the Company and gets on far better with the wide cast of locals. I soaked up the historical setting, and the growing intrigue tided me over to the last third, which delivers everything you’d want in a historical thriller.
Set in the untamed wilds of nineteenth-century colonial India, this dazzling historical thriller introduces Blake and Avery—an unforgettable investigative pair.
India, 1837: William Avery is a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India; Jeremiah Blake is a secret political agent gone native, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, but who cannot resist the challenge of an unresolved mystery. What starts as a wild goose chase for this unlikely pair—trying to track down a missing writer who lifts the lid on Calcutta society—becomes very much more sinister as…
From my days as a student in India in the early 1970s through my years in the U.S. Foreign Service with postings in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kenya, as well as assignments to the India, Kenya, and Uganda desks at the Department of State, I learned something of the cultures of South Asia and East Africa and gained an appreciation for the peoples of those countries. During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had the time to write. I developed a novel that was part autobiography and part fiction, and most of which was set in South Asia and East Africa. The result is Danger and Romance in Foreign Lands.
During my student days in the early 1970s, I travelled throughout North India by train and country bus, often staying in the countryside in former colonial rest houses from days of British rule in India. I tried to imagine what it was like for the British East India Company officials before 1857, and then for the British colonial officials who replaced the company officers after the Indian Sepoy Mutiny.The Siege of Krishnapurvividly recreates the 1857 mutiny from the perspective of British company officials and their families trapped by the local soldiers they had employed.
Farrell used a diary and letters from those besieged in the real city of Lucknow to illustrate the horrors of hunger, impending rape, torture, and eventual death that many of the British faced. The scenes are graphic, and the portrayals of the relationships among those trapped have stayed with me for years. The novel…
In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.
