Tag Archives: Books

In My Hands Today…

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Their Language of Love – Bapsi Sidhwa

A wife worries for her familys survival during the 1965 IndoPak war. A mother is horrified when she learns that her daughter wants to marry her American boyfriend. An American housewife living in Lahore has a tempestuous affair with a Pakistani minister. An aged matriarch travels to the USA to discover she must confront a traumatic memory from her past.

Finely nuanced, and laced with Sidhwas sharply comic observations, this is a stellar collection of tales from one of the subcontinents most important and beloved writers.

In My Hands Today…

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On Sal Mal Lane – Ru Freeman

On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all.

In My Hands Today…

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The Devil on Her Tongue – Linda Holeman

Diamantina is 13 when her father, a Dutch sailor who washed up on the Portuguese island of Porto Santo, abandons her and her African-born mother and sets off for the New World. Unbaptized, tainted by her mother’s witchcraft and her foreign blood, the girl is an outcast who seems doomed in her struggle to survive. Diamantina refuses to accept her destiny and vows to escape her circumstances and forge a life of her own, no matter the cost. But as the price of her desires rises, can she live with the choices she has made? Diamantina’s odyssey to change her life is a sweeping narrative of starvation and plenty, cruelty and love, disaster and triumph.

In My Hands Today…

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The Storyteller of Marrakesh – Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

Each year, the storyteller, Hassan, gathers listeners to the city square to share their recollections of a young, foreign couple who mysteriously disappeared years earlier. As various witnesses describe their encounters with the couple—their tales overlapping, confirming, and contradicting each other—Hassan hopes to light upon details that will explain what happened to them, and to absolve his own brother, who is in prison for their disappearance.

As testimonies circle an elusive truth, the couple takes on an air as enigmatic as their fate. But is this annual storytelling ritual a genuine attempt to uncover the truth, or is it intended instead to weave an ambiguous mythology around a crime?

In My Hands Today…

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Spider’s Web – Agatha Christie

Clarissa, the young wife of a foreign office diplomat, is given to daydreaming. “Supposing I were to come down one morning and find a dead body in the library, what should I do?”, she muses.

She has the chance to find out when she discovers a body … in her drawing room. Desperate to dispose of it, she attempts to persuade her house guests to become accessories and accomplices. Now, as the search begins for the murderer in their midst, supposing a police inspector arrives…