Tag Archives: Memoir

In My Hands Today…

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All Over the Map – Laura Fraser

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What’s a wise, witty travel writer to do when she reaches forty and is still single? Wander the globe searching for romance and adventure, of course.

On a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, to celebrate her fortieth birthday, Laura Fraser confronts the unique trajectory of her life. Divorced and childless in her thirties, she found solace in the wanderlust that had always directed her heart—and found love and comfort in the arms of a dashing Frenchman. Their Italian affair brought her back to herself—but now she wonders if her passion for travel (and for short-lived romantic rendezvous) has deprived her of what she secretly wants most from life: a husband, a family, a home.

When her Parisian lover meets her in Oaxaca and gives her news that he’s found someone new, Laura is stunned and hurt. Now, it seems, she has nothing but her own independence for company—and, at forty, a lot more wrinkles on her face and fewer years of fertility. How is Laura going to reconcile what seem to be two opposite desires: for adventure, travel, great food, and new experiences, but also a place to call home—and a loving pair of arms to greet her there?

And so, she globe hops. What else is a travel writer to do? From Argentina to Peru, Naples to Paris, she basks in the glow of new cultures and local delicacies, always on the lookout for the “one” who might become a lifelong companion. But when a terrible incident occurs while she’s on assignment in the South Pacific, Laura suddenly finds herself more aware of her vulnerability and becomes afraid of traveling. It seems as if she might lose the very thing that has given her so much pleasure in her life, not to mention the career she has built for herself as a world traveler and chronicler of far-flung places.

Finding herself again will be both more difficult and more natural than she imagined. Ultimately, Laura realizes the most important journey she must take is an internal one. And the tale of how she reaches that place will captivate every woman who has ever yearned for a different life.

In My Hands Today…

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Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End – Tarquin Hall

After 10 years living abroad, Tarquin Hall wanted to return to his native London. Lured by his nostalgia for a leafy suburban childhood spent in south-west London, he returned with his Indian-born, American fiancee in tow.

But, priced out of the housing market, they found themselves living not in a townhouse, oozing Victorian charm, but in a squalid attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on London’s Brick Lane. A grimy skylight provided the only window on their new world—a filthy, noisy street where drug dealers and prostitutes peddled their wares and tramps urinated on the pavements.

Yet, as Hall got to know Brick Lane, he discovered beneath its unlovely surface an inner world where immigrants and asylum seekers struggle to better themselves and dream of escape. Salaam Brick Lane is a journey of discovery by an outsider in his own native city.

In My Hands Today…

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The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan – Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller


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Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home—Kabul, Afghanistan—as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.

In My Hands Today…

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Tamil Tigress – Niromi de Soyza

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Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades. With her was her lifelong friend, Ajanthi, also aged 17. Leaving behind them their shocked middle-class families, the teenagers had become part of the Tamil Tigers’ first female contingent.

Equipped with little more than a rifle and a cyanide capsule, Niromi’s group managed to survive on their wits in the jungle, facing not only the perils of war but starvation, illness, and growing internal tensions among the militant Tigers. And then events erupted in ways that she could no longer bear.

How was it that this well-educated, mixed-race, middle-class girl from a respectable family came to be fighting with the Tamil Tigers? Today she lives in Sydney with her husband and children, but Niromi de Soyza is not your ordinary woman and this is her compelling story.

In My Hands Today…

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I Too Had a Dream – Verghese Kurien

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The architect of ‘Operation Flood’, the largest dairy development programme in the world, Dr Verghese Kurien has enabled India to become the largest milk producer in the world.

A man with a rare vision, Dr Kurien has devoted a lifetime to realise his dream – empowering the farmers of India. He has engineered the milk cooperative movement in India. It was a sheer quirk of fate that landed him in Anand where a small group of farmers were forming a cooperative, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’Union Limited (better known as Amul), to sell their milk.

Intrigued by the integrity and commitment of their leader, Tribhuvandas Patel, Dr Kurien joined them. Since then there has been no looking back. The ‘Anand pattern of cooperatives’were so successful that, at the request of the Government of India, he set up the National Dairy Development Board to replicate it across India. He also established the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation to market its products.

In these memoirs, Dr Verghese Kurien, popularly known as the ‘father of the white revolution’, recounts, with customary candour, the story of his life and how he shaped the dairy industry. Profoundly inspiring, these memoirs help up to comprehend the magnitude of his contributions and his multifaceted personality.