Jan, 2024 – The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees By Elif Shafak For their first meeting in 2024 Book Group 1 read ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ By Elif Shafak. Leslie hosted the meeting at her home, there were 9 who attended. In 1974, two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided Cyprus, meet at a tavern in the […]
Nov, 2023 – When Heaven & Earth Change Places by Le Ly Haslip
BG 2 – November 2023 – Review On the morning of 29th November, BG2 met to discuss this book. The book is the memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down. Le Ly had suffered near-starvation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and the deaths of family members—but still held fast […]
Nov, 2023 – My Pen is the Wing of a Bird New Fiction by Afghan Women
BG1 – Review November 24th This is the first anthology of short fiction by Afghan women in an English translation. Eighteen writers tell stories that are both unique and universal – of family, work, childhood, friendship, war, gender identity and cultural traditions. The stories illuminate the personal impact of war on women’s lives and the […]
Oct, 2023 – The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright
BG1 – October 2023 Review The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright In The Orphan Keeper, Chellamuthu, a scamp of an Indian boy, and his family, live in dire poverty. His father is “a man of few words, hasty hand and strong drink— often in reverse order”; his mother works dyeing fabric. Running free in the […]
Oct, 2023 – The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali
BG 2 October 2023 – Review The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali The Stationery Shop is an historical fiction novel set in 1953 in both Tehran, Iran and the United States, that tells the story of Roya and Bahman. In a time of political upheaval, Roya the main protagonist finds solace in the local stationery […]
Sept, 2023 – Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
BG 1 – September 22nd 2023 Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng About the author: Celeste Ng is an American writer and novelist. Her first novel Everything I Never Told You won the Amazon Book of the year award. Her second well known novel is Little Fires Everywhere and was made into a tv miniseries. […]
Sept, 2023 – The Verifiers by Jane Pek
BG2 – September 22nd 2023 Review – The Verifiers by Jane Pek Singapore is where Jane Pek was born and raised. She graduated from Yale University with a BA, the New York University School of Law with a JD, and Brooklyn College with an MFA in fiction. Her short stories have also appeared twice in […]
August, 2023 – Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif
Book Group 2 “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” by Mohammed Hanif. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a tale of love, death, bigotry and violence. It deals with life in its raw form and deconstructs it. It is a love story of Alice Bhatti, a Catholic woman who has just been released from prison and […]
August, 2023 – Seven Moons of Maadi Almeida – Shehan Karunatilaka
Book Group 1 Seven Moon of Maadi Almeida The author says – “1989 was the darkest year in my memory, where there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counterterror squads. It was a time of assassinations, disappearances, bombs and corpses. But by the end of the 1990s, most […]
June, 2023 – Dog Eaters by Jessica Hagedorn
Book Group 2 Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn provided our group with a lively and varied discussion on June 30, 2023. The book is set in Manila and structured as a series of scenes detailing moments in the lives of multiple characters who are sometimes known to each other and sometimes not. […]