A Dictator Calls (2023) by Ismail Kadare: Milan Kundera wrote in his seminal work ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Treading on this dangerous lane, Ismail Kadare, the leading novelist of Albania, draws a fine line between the treacherous historical truth…
Jeremy Nobel’s latest work, published by Penguin Publishing Group, takes on a dynamic look at loneliness and the growing issue of chronic illnesses associated with it. Recently, WHO declared loneliness as a ‘pressing global threat’, so much so that the average mortality quotient is equivalent to the effect of smoking 15 cigarettes every day. Project…
Dive into the poems for Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings imbibed with the solace of her observations in Nature. In an interview with Krista Tippett in 2015, Mary Oliver profoundly proclaimed – ‘I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty…
Learn more about Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), one of the best sci-fi (?) books that will leave all generations fascinated below! To begin with: the question of genre. Labelling a book one genre or the other goes a long way towards setting reader expectations. There are presumptions associated with certain genres. Mary Doria…
Learn more about the key arguments of Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari’s 2016 book, as the author discusses the biggest questions raised by its discourse in the review below. What lies ahead in the future for humankind? Will our technological progress enable us to build a flourishing civilization with the help of machines, or, will…
Come and travel with the author as we explore the simple philosophies of living the hilly-billy silly mountain life that Ruskin Bond professed in his A Book of Simple Living (2015) If a man can be known by the ‘nature’ of his work, literally or more so, a child in us reminisces about Bond. This…