Homesick: Jennifer Croft

Published by Charco Press, 2022, 219 pages. “All of us are anything, everything, brimming with secrets. Above all we are the shelter we seek out in others and the safe havens we become for those we choose to love.” Amy and Zoe are sisters. Amy is older by three years and is very protective of …

Continue reading Homesick: Jennifer Croft

Heart Lamp—Selected Stories: Banu Mushtaq

Translated from Kannada by Deepa BhasthiPublished by Penguin India / And Other Stories, 2025, 216 pages. Original versions of stories first published in 2013 and 2023. A woman whose husband leaves her for another woman is saved by her children; a man who becomes obsessed with a pair of high-heeled shoes forces his wife to …

Continue reading Heart Lamp—Selected Stories: Banu Mushtaq

Cycling Across the Middle East: An Interview with Rebecca Lowe

Rebecca Lowe is a British journalist specializing in the Middle East and human rights. Her book, The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East (2022), was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award 2023. Rebecca has written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times, …

Continue reading Cycling Across the Middle East: An Interview with Rebecca Lowe

Time Shelter: Georgi Gospodinov

Translated from Bulgarian by Angela RodelPublished by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023, 304 pages. Original version published in 2020. What if there was a way to turn back the clock and live in the past? A geriatric psychiatrist called Gaustine, living in Zurich, believes that patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s can be helped by going into …

Continue reading Time Shelter: Georgi Gospodinov

Polite Conversations: Usha Raman

Published by Bee Fiction, 2024, 416 pages. “Beneath the thin fabric that packaged families, there were so many tangled threads, little knots of resentment and bundles of unexpressed anger that reveal themselves in unexpected ways. How much energy they spent on hiding them from view, maintaining the fiction of smoothness, of harmony, of normalcy—whatever that …

Continue reading Polite Conversations: Usha Raman