en-US Wed, 14 May 2025 18:38:00 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 211497920 Why did the Cold War erupt so soon after the Second World War? How did it escalate so rapidly, spanning five continents over six decades? And what led to the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union?

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond.

With remarkable clarity and unique perspective, Zubok argues that the Cold War, often seen as an existential battle between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism, has long been misunderstood. He challenges the popular Western narrative that economic superiority and democratic values led the USA to victory. Instead, he looks beyond the familiar images of East-West rivalry, shining a light on the impact of non-Western actors and placing the war in the context of global decolonisation, Soviet weakness and the accidents of history. Here, he interrogates what happens when stability and peace are no longer the default, when treaties are broken and when diplomacy ceases to function.

Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.]]> 510 Vladislav Zubok 0141985119 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 5.00
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]]> 198137984
The son of two Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, Edward Wong grew up around Washington, DC; his father, a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao, worked in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke about his native land. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II, then fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a new, equitable China, spending harsh years with the Chinese army in northern China and in Xinjiang, along the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with Mao’s brutal policies, he fled to Hong Kong and eventually went to America.


When Edward Wong moved to Beijing as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2008, it gave him a rare opportunity to investigate his father’s mysterious past, while also assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China that his father once held, then abandoned. He had a front-row seat as the world’s two superpowers met at a crossroads. And the years of his tenure saw China’s economic boom and geopolitical expansion, as well as the darker currents of nationalism and ethnic repression and the autocratic rise of President Xi Jinping.


As a son considering his father’s life and his own time in China, Wong provides an epic, moving chronicle of a family and a nation, one that spans more than 80 years and gives insight into a new authoritarian age in China that is transforming the world. It is the essential work for understanding the sweep and direction of modern China.]]> 464 Edward Wong 1984877402 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 3.98
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]]> 207294259 From the award-winning author of The Island of Extraordinary Captives, the riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world’s first seed bank who were faced with an impossible choice during the Second World War’s Siege of eat the seeds to stave off starvation, or protect their life’s work to potentially end world hunger? In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded Leningrad with a plan to besiege the Russian city and starve its citizens into submission. So began the longest blockade in recorded history. By conservative estimates, it would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people—four times the number killed in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. Most died by starvation. At that time, the world’s largest collection of seeds and plants were stored in a converted palace building in the city center. Hand-collected during the previous two decades under the leadership of the world-famous explorer Nikolai Vavilov, the Plant Institute represented the greatest living library of plant matter ever assembled, more than a quarter of a million seeds from every continent. But as the siege wore on, attempts to evacuate this priceless collection failed. Trapped in the city with dwindling supplies, the botanists faced a terrible should they distribute the seeds to the city’s starving population, or preserve them in the hopes that future scientists might use them to breed crops and prevent future famine? Drawing from previously unseen primary sources, The Forbidden Garden tells for the first time the story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the blockade, many of whom sacrificed their lives in service to their mission. As climate change, wars, and supply chain issues impact food security in today’s times, this fascinating story remains as relevant and urgent as ever.]]> 384 Simon Parkin 1668007665 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.21 2024
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]]> 204962337 'Unforgettable' SATHNAM SANGHERA

'Spell-binding' PETER FRANKOPAN

'Fascinating' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

An extraordinary family memoir from acclaimed newsreader and journalist, Mishal Husain, uncovering the story of her grandparents' lives amidst empire, political upheaval and partition.

‘I witnessed the dwindling glow of the British Empire. I saw small men entrusted with great jobs, playing with the destiny of millions��

��The lives of Mishal Husain’s grandparents changed forever in 1947, as the new nation states of India and Pakistan were born. For years she had a partial story, a patchwork of memories and hurried departures, lucky escapes from violence and homes never seen again.

Decades later, the fragment of an old sari sent Mishal on a journey through time, using letters, diaries, memoirs and audio tapes to trace four lives shaped by the Raj, a world war, independence and partition.

Mumtaz rejects the marriage arranged for him as he forges a life with Mary, a devout Catholic from an Anglo-Indian family, while Tahirah and Shahid watch the politics of pre-partition Delhi unfold at close quarters. As freedom comes, bonds fray and communities are divided, leaving two couples to forge new identities, while never forgetting the shared heritage of the past.

‘Beautifully written, emotional and deeply personal, yet universal �� One can't help but be moved by this story of upheaval and transformation�� SADIQ KHAN]]> 321 Mishal Husain 0008531706 Saurabh 0 4.22 2024
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]]> 206032553 Is this how democracy dies?
Based on his smash hit podcast, The Coming Storm is Gabriel Gatehouse's brilliant exploration of the roots of Q Anon and the rise of the extreme right in the US. It's a story that reaches back decades, showing how a dark fantasy embedded itself in the American consciousness, threatening to derail its democracy - and it continues to unfold today. Gatehouse's riveting book takes you down a rabbit hole - one that both the US as a nation and he as a journalist fell through - to unpack an epochal shift in political culture that starts in the earliest years of the Clinton administration and reaches a crescendo on 6 January 2021 with the storming of the US Capitol. But that event wasn't the wild finale of a chaotic Trump presidency many hoped for - it was only the beginning.

A compelling mix of reportage and personal experience, The Coming Storm gets under the skin of these conspiracy theories to show us a radical new kind of politics emerging, a movement that has coalesced around a loose alliance of white supremacists, men's rights activists, tech bros, and radically disenchanted leftists. As we approach the 2024 US presidential election, and perhaps the most perilous moment in the history of American democracy, Gatehouse's book tells us some dark truths about our present, and provides clues about our future. It marks the debut of a major new voice in political journalism.]]> 363 Gabriel Gatehouse 1473533430 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.15
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]]> 220074328 For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills - from the Mongol yoke to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, from Soviet atheism to the chaotic 1990s. Now again, it is at the right hand of power, sanctifying Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes distort theology as they preach Slav Christian supremacy and drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.

Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of lives - from the tower blocks of big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first century Russia.]]> 384 Lucy Ash 1837731837 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.62
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]]> 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.21 2024
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]]> 211003691
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children’s book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.]]> 320 Victoria Amelina 1250367689 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.46
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]]> 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature�� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.41 2025
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]]> 218445588 A darkly comic novel of subterfuge, whisky glasses, and the drive of an underdog to find the truth, no matter the consequences...


Welcome to the The Harrow, last survivor of London's once-notorious muckraking magazines. John Salmon, its battle-hardened editor, and his misfit journalists have fought for years to keep it alive, but extinction looms.


Neither the arrival of trainee Danny Roth nor a local gangland killing looks set to change that. But as John reluctantly allows Danny to investigate the murder, they soon find themselves entangled in a story that could save The Harrow - but might cost them their lives...

A brilliantly plotted crime mystery full of larger-than-life characters from the seamy underbelly of modern London.]]> Noah Eaton 1805462091 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 0.0
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]]> 199820684
In London, twenty-six-year-old Venetia Stanley—aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless—is part of a fast group of upper-crust bohemians and socialites known as “The Coterie.�� She’s also engaged in a clandestine love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state.

As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer with Scotland Yard is assigned to investigate a leak of top-secret documents. Suddenly, what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that could topple the British government—and will alter the course of political history.

An unrivaled master of seamlessly weaving fact and fiction, Precipice is another electrifying thriller from the brilliant imagination of Robert Harris.]]> 464 Robert Harris 0063248050 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.86 2024
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]]> 224869724
What happens when you suddenly find yourself an unwanted foreigner?

Tess and Arlo have made a happy life on St Mira. But the island is not immune to the forces reshaping the world. When a far-right government surges to power, foreigners are their first target. It's time for Tess and Arlo to leave. But what if it's too late?

The Accidental Immigrants is political fiction based on the facts of the years since Brexit: the fallout from the referendum, the rise of the far right, and the increasing xenophobia towards people on the move. Set on an island that's a mirror image of Britain, it's both allegory and warning, and a poignant, prescient tale for our times about the dangers facing us all.]]> 315 Jo McMillan 1915693179 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.67
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]]> 202468422 From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time.

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.��]]> 464 Elif Shafak 0593801717 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.38 2024
author: Elif Shafak
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]]> 219551286 From the best-selling and award-winning author of The Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet intextricably linked—a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St, Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style

It’s the summer of 2021, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is facing challenges of his own, including his adopted daughter’s tenuous relationship with her own biological mother—a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily proximate to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on catastrophic natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of re-wilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvelous new light.


With characteristic brilliance and humor, Parallel Lines investigates themes of dualism, determinism, connection and love. St. Aubyn captures the life of the spirit as vibrantly as the life of the mind, in a novel that wrestles with moral and psychic anguish and the cascading consequences of our choices at every stage of life. A thrilling, wholly captivating work from one of the most gifted writers at work today.]]> 272 Edward St Aubyn 0593535340 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.50 2025
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]]> 199846846
Baby faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to build a reputation with local LA gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos -- so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a baby instead. The imprisoned overlords who rule their world must be placated so the gang lures Giovanni across the border and plots his disposal. But, in turn, the gang botches Giovanni's killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the whole gang who drove him to do it.

The Rent Collectors is filled with ruthless gang members, tattoo artists, a legendary FBI investigator, a girl who risks her life to serve as a witness, all in service to the story of the irrationally courageous immigrant whose ethical stance triggers these incredible events.

Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being exploited both by the gangs and by the city of LA -- in other words, by two sets of rent collectors.]]> 320 Jesse Katz 1662601735 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.20
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]]> 192724080
In 2018, many Americans watched in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump's "family separation" policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty , this was only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s—one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee.

As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these "black sites" exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn't have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.]]> 384 Ana Raquel Minian 0593654250 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.41 2024
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]]> 198701985 From the New York Times best-selling author of Ghosts and Everything I Know About a story of heartbreak and friendship and how to survive both.

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped.

Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story��

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 354 Dolly Alderton 0593801318 Saurabh 0 3.80 2023
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average rating: 3.80
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]]> 230835165 From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that spans decades.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Mohammed Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy with one eye, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope.]]> 592 Chris Whitaker 1398707678 Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.31 2024
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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]]> 13131528 A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself.

The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.

With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.]]> 448 Jason Roberts 0385666802 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.11 2024
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]]> 207294335
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died.

Greenberg’s biography traces Lewis’s life through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the “conscience of the Congress.��

Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg’s biography captures John Lewis’s influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on “Bloody Sunday�� in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.]]> 704 David Greenberg 1982142995 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.54 2024
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]]> 112976397
In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption―but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora ―a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender�� state.

Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation. Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case.

Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.]]> 320 Rachel Nolan 0674270355 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.59
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]]> 209650054 A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.��

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.]]> 794 Benjamin Nathans 0691255571 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.30
author: Benjamin Nathans
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.30
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]]> 201750923
When Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist in the South Indian city of Bangalore, was assassinated in September 2017 outside her home, it wasn’t just a loss to her close-knit community of writers and activists—the shock reverberated nationwide, making headlines and sparking mass protests. Why was she targeted, and who was behind it? Following the case to its stunning, unsettling conclusion, Rollo Romig uncovers a world of political extremists, fearless writers, organized crime, and shadowy religious groups.

I Am on the Hit List is an epic narrative that moves between a historic booksellers�� district and brand-new high rises funded by IT wealth, to a secretive ashram in Goa and the kitchens of an international vegetarian restaurant chain, boldly interrogating whether we can break the cycle of polarization and bloodshed inspiring political murder across the globe.]]> 400 Rollo Romig 0143135287 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.21 2024
author: Rollo Romig
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 201111706
Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.]]> 260 Stacey Levine 1959163019 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.51 2024
author: Stacey Levine
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 66088917
Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.

A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.

As he moves around the south, from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, primarily, to his second home of Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters with a variety of colorful characters and mythical circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, and bigots. The lead among these characters is, of course, The Unicorn Woman, who exists, but mostly lives in Bud’s private mythology.

Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.]]> 192 Gayl Jones 0807030031 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.10
author: Gayl Jones
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.10
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]]> 179455076
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.]]> 280 Richard Flanagan 1761343467 Saurabh 0 4.19 2023
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> 195448999 Mumbai, in the early 90s. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement is at its peak, and the Babri Masjid has just fallen. Decades later, in a corner of the metropolis, a retired postman living alone in a dilapidated room tries to recall those months of madness and how they changed everyone he knew.
This is the story of Rameshwar Shinde and Ravinarayan Kumar, a young woman called Janaki, and the neighbours they live with, in the shadows of towers. It is a story of families torn apart by bigotry, an unmissable retelling of the epic Ramayana set at a time when blood mixed with the grime of Mumbai's streets. A tale more pertinent than ever, in a country once again teetering on the edge.]]> 320 Lindsay Pereira 9357082476 Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 3.84
author: Lindsay Pereira
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> 202423317
Kanisetti takes us back in time to witness the birth of the Chalukyas, a dynasty that shaped southern India for centuries. Beginning at a time when Hinduism was still establishing itself through the Deccan, when the landscape was bereft of temples, he explores the extraordinary transformation of the peninsula over half a millennium. In vivid and colourful detail, Kanisetti describes how the mighty empires of medieval India were made: how temple-building and language manipulation were used as political tools; how royals involved themselves in religious struggles between Jains and Buddhists, Shaivas and Vaishnavas; and how awe-inspiring rituals were used to elevate kings over their rivals and subjects. In doing so, he transforms medieval Indian royals, merchants and commoners from obscure figures to complex, vibrant people. Kanisetti takes us into the minds of powerful rulers of the Chalukya, Pallava, Rashtrakuta and Chola dynasties, and animates them and their world with humanity and depth.

It is a world of bloody elephant warfare and brutal military stratagems; of alliances and betrayals; where a broken king commits ritual suicide, and a shrewd hunchbacked prince founds his own kingdom under his powerful brother’s nose. This is a world where a king writes a bawdy play that is a parable for religious contestation; where the might of India’s rulers and the wealth of its cities were talked of from Arabia to Southeast Asia; and where south Indian kingdoms serially invaded and defeated those of the north. This painstakingly researched forgotten history of India will keep you riveted and enthralled. You will never see the history of the subcontinent the same way again.]]> 480 Anirudh Kanisetti Saurabh 0 4.23
author: Anirudh Kanisetti
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.23
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]]> 96177657
'An instant classic' MARINA HYDE
'At last a politician who can write' SEBASTIAN FAULKS
'Candid, angry, funny, and self-revelatory' JONATHAN DIMBLEBY
'Exceptional' RAFAEL BEHR

The Times pick for *The Biggest Books of the Autumn*

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise.

Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow our democracy and government had become.

Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict.

Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, Politics On the Edge is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life and a remarkable portrait of our age.]]> 436 Rory Stewart Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.33 2023
author: Rory Stewart
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
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]]> 201268174 ‘Savaş�� prose is an X-ray �� an acute portrait of the tender frequencies that make a life.�� Raven Leilani, author of Luster

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. Removed from the web of family and its obligations, what traditions and rituals should they establish together?

As they dream about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days gathering footage from the neighbourhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs, anxious to know how people really live. ‘Forget about daily life,�� chides her grandmother on the phone, ‘no one cares about that.��

Meanwhile, life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues �� parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up �� all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of home-building and modern love, written with Aysegül Savaş�� distinctive elegance, warmth and humour.

Advance praise for THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

��The Anthropologists��is about love, youth, and that most profound and elusive of subjects �� happiness. Full of delicacy, wisdom and wit, this is another gorgeous work from one of my favourite writers.�� Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
����
‘Like Walter Benjamin, Ayşegül Savaş uncovers trapdoors to bewilderment everywhere in everyday life; like Henry James, she sees marriage as a mystery, unsoundably deep.��The Anthropologists��is mesmerising; I felt I read it in a single breath.�� Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
��
‘Yet another gorgeous, gorgeous book from Aysegül Savaş: she is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows. Savaş knows hope. Savaş knows despair. Savaş knows joy, and malaise, and laughter and curiosity. There are worlds inside of Savaş' prose, and The Anthropologists is both a bright light and a map for how to be. A massively heartening achievement.�� Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal]]> 189 Aysegül Savas Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 3.92 2024
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
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]]> 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.17 2022
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
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]]> 196217516 Things change; we have to recognise that; the world will not stay still. What we must hope is that the new is better and stronger than the old.

Anno Domini 1546. In a manor house in England a young woman feels the walls are closing round her, while her dying husband is obsessed by his vision of a chapel where prayers will be said for his immortal soul.

As the days go by and the chapel takes shape, the outside world starts to intrude. And as the old ways are replaced by the new, the people of the village sense a dangerous freedom.

The Book of Days is a beautifully written novel of lives lived in troubled times and the solace to be found in nature and the turning seasons.]]> 290 Francesca Kay 1800753500 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.07
author: Francesca Kay
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.07
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]]> 219359694
Many years later, she met Russell Ryan, an American man holidaying in Austria. They fell in love, married and moved to New York, where she lived a quiet life as an adoring suburban housewife, beloved friend and neighbour. No one, not even her husband, knew the truth of her past, until one day a New York Times journalist knocked on their door,
blowing their lives apart.

The Mare tells Hermine and Russell’s story for the first time in fiction. It explores how an ordinary woman could descend so quickly into evil, examining the role played by government propaganda, ideology, fear and cognitive dissonance, and asks why her husband chose to stay with her despite discovering what she had done.]]> 322 Angharad Hampshire Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.41
author: Angharad Hampshire
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.41
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]]> 200837962
After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women's agency in the Second World War.]]> 224 Clare Mulley 1399601067 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.17 2024
author: Clare Mulley
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 197525309 The acclaimed marine biologist and author of The Brilliant Abyss examines the existential threats the world’s ocean will face in the coming decades and offers cautious optimism for much of the abundant life within in

No matter where we live, “we are all ocean people,�� Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today’s increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations—critical to balanced ecosystems—have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and oft-unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas—the apex predators—have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.

Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.]]> 320 Helen Scales 0802162991 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.05 2024
author: Helen Scales
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 200158232
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times , Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.

As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.]]> 304 Yuan Yang 0593493907 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 3.98 2024
author: Yuan Yang
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
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]]> 207297833 A vibrant memoir from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Nenah Cherry who shares an inside look at her fascinating career and globe-traversing journeys in a life of love and music. Born in Sweden in 1964, Neneh Cherry’s father Ahmadu was a musician from Sierra Leone. Her mother, Moki, was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish textile artist. Her parents split up just after Neneh was born, and not long afterwards Moki met and fell in love with acclaimed jazz musician Don Cherry. Eventually, the strong pull New York City in the 1970s drew him them there, but they made a home wherever they traveled. Neneh and her brother Eagle Eye experienced a life of creativity, freedom, and, of course, music. In A Thousand Threads, Neneh takes readers from the charming old schoolhouse in the woods of Sweden where she grew up, to the village in Sierra Leone that was birthplace of her biological father, to the early punk scene in London and New York, to finding her identity with her stepfather’s family in Watts, California. Neneh has lived an extraordinary life of connectivity and creativity and she recounts in intimate detail how she burst onto the scene as a teenager in the punk band The Slits, and went on to release her first album in 1989 with a worldwide hit single “Buffalo Stance.�� Neneh’s inspiring and deeply compelling memoir both celebrates female empowerment and shines a light on the global music scene—and is perfect for anyone interested in the artistic life in all its forms.]]> 304 Neneh Cherry 1982161043 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.14 2024
author: Neneh Cherry
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
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]]> 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025*

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.79 2025
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.70 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 214152321 Shortlisted for The Women’s Prize �� Named a most anticipated book by Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, The BBC, Daily Mail (London), and more

A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.

First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York City trying to find deeper meaning by quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up in jail, the family’s upper-class veneer is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a quest to restore the family name to its former glory, but what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Can they bring their old inheritance into a new tomorrow?

By turns satirical and philosophical, spanning from 1940s Iran to a splintered 2000s, The Persians upends the reader’s expectations while exploring questions about love, family, money, art, and how to find yourself and each other when your country is lost. Wry and witty, brazen and absurd, The Persians is a deeply moving reinvention of the American family saga.]]> 384 Sanam Mahloudji 166801579X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.50 2024
author: Sanam Mahloudji
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 150247447
In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos.

That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences.

Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud.

Compulsively readable and uncompromising, The Adversary is a masterful evocation of a lost time, and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution.]]> 336 Michael Crummey 0385550324 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.70 2023
author: Michael Crummey
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 124937349 One apartment, three women, one man. One of the women is dead. When the emergency personnel arrive, they realize: Elisabeth starved to death, encouraged by her roommates.
Winner of the 2021 European Union Literature Prize

In the middle of a summer night, Elisabeth, the oldest resident of the Sound & Love Commune, dies. Her sister Melodie and their two other housemates are arrested: the group’s attempts to stop eating and start living on light and love alone appears to have been fatal to Elisabeth. From unworldly idealists on the fringes of society, the three suddenly become suspects in a criminal case. Through the eyes of the night, the neighbors, doubt, the scent of an orange, and many other characters and entities, we see how each of those involved gives a different answer to the question of how Elisabeth came to die. Who is to blame? And does the commune still have a future? We Are Light is a highly original and entertaining novel about manipulation, vulnerability, and trying to be better.]]> 195 Gerda Blees 1642861308 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.75 2020
author: Gerda Blees
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 129549819 The stunning new collection of stories from the award-winning author of The Liar’s Dictionary and Attrib. and Other Stories.

Granta Best Young British novelist and author of Attrib. and other stories, Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient �� from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, here characters seek connections not only with each other but also with versions of themselves.

In ‘Cuvier’s Feather��, a courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. At the centre of ‘Wilgefortis��, a child’s schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. An editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention; an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips.

Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths.

Praise for Eley

'She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own�� Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

'Funny, playful and utterly bravura�� Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

'It's exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams's writing�� Vanity Fair]]> 193 Eley Williams 0008618941 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.47
author: Eley Williams
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.47
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]]> 204568943 It was a peace offering, I knew that

you don't appear on someone's doorstep uninvited, saying Alright
unless you want to make amends

It's been six years since Rosa last saw her brother. Six years since they last spoke. Six years since they last fought. Six years since she gave up on the idea of having a brother.

She's spent that time carefully not thinking about him. Not remembering their childhood. Not mentioning those stories, even to the people she loves.

Now the distance she had so carefully put between them has collapsed. Can she find a way to make peace - to forgive, to be forgiven - when the past she's worked so hard to contain threatens to spill over into the present?

From the acclaimed author of little scratch, this is a moving, powerfully honest novel about how we love, how we grieve and how we forgive.]]> 297 Rebecca Watson 0571356745 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.88 2024
author: Rebecca Watson
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.56 2024
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 57504849
Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel where he must flash his “toothpaste-white smile�� for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and draws life lessons from the game of chess.

But Able’s ordinary life is upended when an early morning room service order leads him to interfere with Akudo, a sex worker involved with a powerful but dangerous hotel guest. Suddenly caught in a web of violence, guilt, and fear, Able must run to save himself—a journey that leads him into the desert with a group of drug-addled migrants, headed by a charismatic religious leader calling himself Ben Ten. The travelers�� dream of reaching Europe and a new life in a better place is shattered when they fall prey to human traffickers, suffer starvation, and find themselves on the precipice of death, fighting for their lives and their freedom.

As Able God moves into the treacherous unknown, his consciousness becomes��focused on survival and the foundations of his beliefs—his ideas about betterment and salvation—are forever altered. Suspenseful, incisive, and illuminating, The Road to the Salt Sea is a story of family, fate, religion, survival, the failures of the Nigerian class system, and what often happens to those who seek their fortunes elsewhere.]]> 300 Samuel Kolawole 0063050889 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.80 2024
author: Samuel Kolawole
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
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]]> 212092487
A telephone station switchboard operator is ordered to monitor the calls she connects and Emilia overhears a mysterious coded conversation. It continues to distract her, but not as much as the growing realization that she is falling in unsanctioned love with her best friend Kalina. Meanwhile, outside the city of Frombork, Antek, a shipyard engineer and a Solidarity labor union treasurer, escapes from prison and works to recover the union’s money, a task which in time leads him to Emilia’s town. In the metropolitan city of Gdańsk, Roman, a secret police major, wants the money for himself and dreams of his own escape and the magical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

As the only daughter of a local Communist Party apparatchik, Emilia has enjoyed a sheltered life, but with the advent of martial law, her mother’s influence can no longer shield her. She faces choices she never expected to make when she discovers her best friend’s and lover’s involvement with the resistance. With new allies and enemies in town, the time to choose a side is now.

In his debut novel, Karol Lagodzki What separates people who transcend their fear and take risks for the sake of change from the rest of us? The answer is up to the readers.]]> 269 Karol Lagodzki Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.15
author: Karol Lagodzki
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.15
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]]> 195830847
Monk’s haphazard pilgrimage leads him through a city in flux: growing, gentrifying, haunted by its history and its unrealized potential. Everyone he knew from college seems to be doing better than him—and most of them aren’t even doing that well. His run-ins with former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers challenge his version of events past and present, revealing that recovery is not the happy ending he’d expected, only a fraught next chapter.

Like a sober, millennial Jesus�� Son, Michael Deagler’s debut novel is the poignant confession of a recovering addict adrift in the fragmenting landscape of America’s middle class. Shot through with humor, hubris, and hard-earned insight, Early Sobrieties charts the limbos that exist between our better and worst selves, offering a portrait of a stifled generation collectively slouching towards grace.]]> 272 Michael Deagler 1662602243 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.75
author: Michael Deagler
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.75
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]]> 203956715 A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On TyrannyTimothy Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times.�� As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for.Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.]]> 368 Timothy Snyder 0593728726 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.29 2024
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 127282888
"You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do." ―Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality, from a soon-to-be superstar.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire , becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles ―and triples―down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California , is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.]]> 230 Venita Blackburn 0374602824 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.12 2024
author: Venita Blackburn
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 175678711 A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret libraries, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.92 2019
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 278 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.77 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 205544315 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters �� the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost �� that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.]]> 192 Banu Mushtaq 1916751164 Saurabh 0 3.58
author: Banu Mushtaq
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.58
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]]> 228394781 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.]]> 160 Vincent Delecroix 1913109372 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.05
author: Vincent Delecroix
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.05
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]]> 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.84 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 88564033 122 Anne Serre 0811234517 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.52
author: Anne Serre
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.52
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]]> 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Saurabh 4 to-read-thriller 4.04 2022
author: Danya Kukafka
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read-thriller
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]]> 200555235 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.66 2024
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 212808296 Eagerly awaited debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired young writers. A daring and inventive reimagining of the infamous set of laws, the Code Noir, that once governed Black lives.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art: a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple and ingenious: it is modeled on the infamous real-life "Code Noir," a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. In other words, the Code that contained and restricted the activities of Black people in the Caribbean.
The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine short, linked fictions that present vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments of Black life as it really existed and still exists, winding in and around, over and under the official decrees, refusing to be contained or ruled. Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from fantasy to historical fiction, this loosely linked stream of 59 irrepressible stories comments on, underscores, undermines, mocks, breaks and redefines the Code's intent. An original, timely, culturally daring, virtuoso performance by a rising literary star.]]> 416 Canisia Lubrin 159376796X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.63 2025
author: Canisia Lubrin
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 123154301 192 Dominique Fortier 1552454681 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.94
author: Dominique Fortier
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 199809440
In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was an AI chatbot called ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive - until now.

In Supremacy, Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech monopolies whose power is unprecedented in history. The story focuses on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind.

Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media and more. With exclusive access to a network of high-ranking sources, Parmy Olson uses her 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.]]> 336 Parmy Olson 1250337747 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.02 2024
author: Parmy Olson
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
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]]> 61182423 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

Winner of the 2022��National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022


“Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”��The Washington Post

“A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”��The Wall Street Journal

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape.

We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history.����

Beverly Gage’s monumental work ��explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her ��nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.�� Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower ����him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. ��Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party.

G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.]]> 858 Beverly Gage 0593492617 Saurabh 5 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.49 2022
author: Beverly Gage
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
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]]> 19074261
The latest trainee detective to work with him is the son of a member of his former team, and together they begin to unravel the truth about what happened to Wayne Fletcher. As the investigation proceeds, it becomes clear that others are involved - some seem determined to prevent it, some seem to be taking too much interest. In the end Smith operates alone, having stepped too far outside standard procedures to ask for support. He knows that his own life might be at risk but he has not calculated on the life of his young assistant also being put in danger. He might still get his man but at what cost?]]> 251 Peter Grainger Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.99 2013
author: Peter Grainger
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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review:

]]> 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making��a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists��the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until �� betrayed and brokenhearted �� she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America �� but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 3.90 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 178634496 The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told is a selection of some of the finest literary short fiction written by Indian writers since the genre came into being in the country in the late nineteenth century. Including early masters of the form, contemporary stars, as well as brilliant writers who came of age in the twenty-first century, this anthology takes in its sweep stories from the various regions, languages, and literatures of India. These authors are some of the most feted in the annals of Indian literature and have, between them, won virtually every major literary prize on offer—including the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and numerous state, national, and international honours.]]> 524 Arunava Sinha 9393852898 Saurabh 5 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.08
author: Arunava Sinha
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
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]]> 156007966
Set in 2011, when dairy product shortages across Japan made butter a hot commodity, Butter depicts a vivid, panoramic view of contemporary Japan as seen through a diverse cast of Japanese women. An endlessly entertaining and sharply insightful look at the relationships between women and how they engage and challenge one another, revealing the many contradictions and complexities in the process, Asako Yuzuki’s novel is filled with intoxicating descriptions of food and the body that also looks deeply at its connection to the sinister, criminal, and taboo, its enduring power and delight.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236427 Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 3.66 2017
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> 215031856 Shattering the mould of the modern prime ministerial memoir and written in his inimitable style, Boris Johnson’s Unleashed is an honest, unrestrained and deeply revealing book by the politician who has dominated our times.

Underlying everything in the book is Johnson’s belief that the UK is an extraordinary country and should have an exceptional future.

From trouncing Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral race in 2008 to becoming Prime Minister, he takes readers through all the big decisions during his time in power and the reasons he took them. The challenges and crises, how they were resolved �� or not �� and how he nearly died from Covid. Riots, knife crime, bikes, buses, the London Olympics and so much more. He writes about his role in Brexit and the constitutional sea-change that took place in British politics in 2019 �� with his landslide election victory and the massive expansion in the groups that think of themselves as Conservative.

This is the reality as he saw unvarnished, uncensored, unleashed.]]> 761 Boris Johnson 0008618216 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 3.95
author: Boris Johnson
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.42 2025
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 215102839
Basically, I have had an unexpectedly difficult decade �� there have been surprising joys, but also deep revelations and challenging lows. I shall be honest about those, because what I discovered in the difficult times were my, what I call, treasures. Treasures �� practical tools, values, ways, answers researched from some great scientists, neuroscientists, therapists, sociologists (all the ‘ists��) out there, that have genuinely led to a sense of freedom, joy, peace and physical recovery I never would have thought possible. Life now, amazingly, with what I will share, is �� SUCH FUN! (always important to quote your own catch phrases. . .)

If you fancy having a read, then I hope my story might help your story. After all, we are in this beautiful, mysterious, challenging life together. Rest assured there are funny stories along the way �� we will have a laugh too, my dear reader chum. Oh, and I couldn’t possibly say if there is a love story in it . . . (There is - shush) Exciting.]]> 408 Miranda Hart 1405958359 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 3.92 2024
author: Miranda Hart
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 220137546 Sunday Times bestseller

A Sunday Times best biography of the year

'It's an incredible read for anyone facing adversity in their life; how to cope with it, how to stay positive in really difficult situations.' - Sally Nugent

'A throat-catching love letter to his wife and children . . . this lovely man has reframed a universally sad story into a life-enhancing one. The overall message is one of hope.' - The Times

'It's just stunning; funny and beautifully written' - as heard on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show

'A candid, sad yet ultimately life-affirming book. There is a thread of gratitude that runs far deeper than performative celebrity humility.' - Guardian

--------

Sir Chris Hoy knows better than most how life can change in the blink of an eye.

In elite sport, the margin between victory and defeat is miniscule, and the pressure is immense. Chris has built a glittering sporting career on understanding these how to feel for them, how to cope with them, how to make them count.

Last year, he faced another life-changing moment. He found out that the ache in his shoulder was in fact a tumour, and that he had Stage 4 cancer.

He will be living with this disease for the rest of his life.

In this memoir, Chris shares the next phase of his extraordinary life with exceptional bravery. He looks over the challenges he has faced thus far, and the ways he has taken them on. With his wife Sarra and their young children by his side, he shares how he has used these experiences to find ways to focus on the moments that matter, showing us how to do the same.

--------

What readers

'Honest, inspirational and beautifully written.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐��
'A must read for anyone facing adversity in their lives, or indeed anybody who needs to put positivity back into theirs.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐��
'This has really helped me navigate my own cancer journey. Thank you Chris!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐��
'I already had a sense of pride when I bought this book. It turned out to be everything I had hoped it would be.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐��
'What a man. Such an inspiring read - read it over a weekend. Couldn't put it down.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐]]> 224 Sir Chris Hoy 139974187X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.59
author: Sir Chris Hoy
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]]> 177185884
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potter’s fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?

In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.

The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.

Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.]]> 336 Pamela Prickett 0593239059 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.00 2024
author: Pamela Prickett
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
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]]> 198902271 A deeply reported work of journalism that explores the promises and perils of microfinance, told through the eyes of international lenders and women borrowers in West Africa

In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an American trained Bangladeshi economist, met a poor female stool maker who needed money to expand her business. In an act widely known as the beginning of microfinance, Yunus lent $27 to forty-two women, hoping small credit would help the women pull themselves out of poverty. Soon, Yunus’s Grameen Bank was born, and the idea of giving very small, high-interest loans to poor people took off. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to create economic and social development from below.��

But there’s a problem with this story. There are mounting concerns that these small loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty, with borrowers from India to Kenya facing consequences such as jail time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds have even committed suicide.

What happened? Did microfinance take a wrong turn, or was it flawed from the beginning?

Mara Kardas-Nelson’s We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Their narratives, woven through a deep history of modern international development, are set against the rise of Yunus’s vision that tiny loans would “put poverty in museums.�� Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more important, who gets left behind?]]> 400 Mara Kardas-Nelson 1250817226 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.15 2024
author: Mara Kardas-Nelson
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 201751824 How states are making their legal systems more equitable, seen through the story of a Black man falsely imprisoned for thirty years for murder.

In 1987, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.�� The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses, and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison.

Eventually independent investigators, new witness testimony, the foreman of the jury that convicted him, and a new Dallas DA convinced a Texas judge that Spencer had nothing to do with the killing, and in 2021 he was released from prison.

As Spencer’s fight to clear himself demonstrates, our legal systems are expedience is more important than the truth. That is starting to change as states across the country implement new efforts to reduce wrongful convictions, and one of the states leading the way is Texas.

Award-winning journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty has spent years digging into this issue, and she has immersed herself in Spencer’s case. She has combed police files and court records, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and had extensive conversations with Spencer, and in Bringing Ben Home she threads together two how an innocent Black man got caught up in and couldn’t escape a legal system that refused to admit its mistakes; and what Texas and other states are doing to address wrongful convictions to make the legal process more equitable for everyone.

By turns fascinating and enraging, personal and provocative, Bringing Ben Home is the powerful story of one innocent man who refused to admit that he was guilty of murder, and how his plight became part of a paradigm shift in how the legal system thinks about innocence as it institutes new methods to overturn wrongful convictions to better protect people like Ben Spencer.]]> 463 Barbara Bradley Hagerty 0593420101 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.42
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]]> 203164386 A groundbreaking argument on how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of democracy down to what we watched on TV—by an acclaimed n+1 writer

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back.

Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power.Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture”—the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs.

To see American life through the lens of Homeland’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political, and cultural fabric.]]> 592 Richard Beck 0593240227 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.08
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name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 195790616
In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.]]> 368 Michael Waters 0374609810 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.43 2024
author: Michael Waters
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average rating: 4.43
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]]> 209050047 An eye-opening rethinking of 19th-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early 19th century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South.

Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.��By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South.

Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes�� and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth�� and assembling “slave brogans.�� In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors lay claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.

Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the 19th century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.]]> 496 Seth Rockman 0226723453 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.48
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]]> 63095764 The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.

Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.
]]> 776 Edda L. Fields-Black 019755279X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.18 2024
author: Edda L. Fields-Black
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]]> 205478828
In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed.

Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Frederick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story, Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.]]> 336 Justene Hill Edwards 1324073853 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.09
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]]> 127282597
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.]]> 320 Madeleine Gray 1250890594 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.61 2024
author: Madeleine Gray
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.61
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]]> 203956647 A brand new series. An iconic new detective duo. And a puzzling new murder to solve...

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 059365322X.]]> 400 Richard Osman Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 4.06 2024
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average rating: 4.06
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]]> 188025684
When Alice realises that Tasha is struggling - with money, the kids, losing her identity - she suggests they do a lifeswap for a week. Alice and Kyle will come to stay at Tasha's terraced house to look after the twins, while Tasha and Harry spend the week in Alice and Kyle's Venice apartment.

But a few days in, it all goes terribly wrong. Tasha receives a phone call to say Alice is in hospital and Kyle is dead after an intruder broke into their house. They think it must have been a burglary gone wrong.

Until a note arrives through the letterbox saying It was supposed to be you.

Who was there that night, and why?
Is it really Tasha they are targeting?
And can these two sisters find the answers they need, or are they about to stumble upon something more sinister?]]> 400 Claire Douglas 140595762X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 4.00 2024
author: Claire Douglas
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 179312410 532 Nicci French 006329835X Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.79 2024
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average rating: 3.79
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]]> 216594965 She knew there'd be ghosts in Oxford, she just didn't think they'd make their way to the dictionary.

Oxford, England. After a decade abroad, Martha Thornhill has returned home to the city whose ancient institutions have long defined her family. But the ghosts she had thought to be at rest seem to have been waiting for her to return. When an anonymous letter is delivered to the Clarendon English Dictionary, where Martha is a newly hired senior editor, it's rapidly clear that this is not the usual lexicographical enquiry. Instead, the coded letter hints at secrets and lies linked to a particular year.��

The date can mean only one, the summer Martha's brilliant older sister Charlie went missing.��

When more letters arrive, Martha and her team pull apart the complex clues within them, and soon, the mystery becomes ever more insistent and troubling. Because it seems Charlie had been keeping a powerful secret, and someone may be trying to lead the lexicographers towards the truth that will unravel the mystery of her disappearance. But other forces are no less desperate to keep their secrets well and truly buried, and Martha and her team must crack the codes before it's too late.

From resident lexicographer Susie Dent comes a linguistic mystery that will both delight and shock readers.]]> 384 Susie Dent 1464236070 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.87 2024
author: Susie Dent
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.87
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]]> 209968362 �� Whatever happened to beloved Girls series characters Ellie, Magda and Nadine? ⭐They're all grown up now - but if they think life's done surprising them, they'd better think again...Being an adult isn’t quite what Ellie Allard dreamed it would be when she was fourteen years old. Though she’s got her beautiful daughter Lottie, life-long best friends in Magda and Nadine and her trusty cat Stella, her love life is non-existent and she feels like she’s been living on auto-pilot, just grateful to be able to afford the rent on her pokey little flat. But this year on her birthday, the universe seems to decide it’s time to for all that to change �� whether Ellie wants it to or not. As she navigates new, exciting and often choppy waters, she’s about to discover that life will never stop surprising you �� if only you let it.Bringing the same warmth and humour to an adult novel as she does to her work for children, Jacqueline Wilson finally answers the questions readers have been asking her for years in this uplifting, life-affirming book about friendship, family and finding fulfilment in unexpected places.]]> 344 Jacqueline Wilson 1529930057 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 3.21 2024
author: Jacqueline Wilson
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read, to-read-fiction
review:

]]> 134221617
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh, whose aunt married into the wealthy Ammar family, confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring�� the family. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.]]> 256 Susan Muaddi Darraj 0063324237 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.07 2024
author: Susan Muaddi Darraj
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read, to-read-fiction
review:

]]> 54811086 New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound - and dangerous - secrets hidden within its walls?

"What was it like? Living in that house?" Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a non-fiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity - and skepticism.

Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself - a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.]]> 379 Riley Sager 1529358221 Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.09 2020
author: Riley Sager
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
review:

]]> 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 3.55 2023
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
review:

]]> 150247395
Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820702 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 4.28 2024
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 127282247
Then two local men end up dead, with all signs pointing to the opium trade, and a botched effort to disappear the bodies draws lawmen to town. Alma scrambles to keep them away from her operation but is distracted by the surprise appearance of Bess Spencer—an ex-Pinkerton's agent and Alma’s first love—after years of silence. A handsome young stranger comes to town, too, and falls into an affair with one of Alma's crewmen. When he starts asking questions about opium, Alma begins to suspect she’s welcomed a spy into her inner circle, and is forced to consider how far she’ll go to protect her trade.

Katrina Carrasco plunges readers into the vivid, rough-and-tumble world of the late-1800s Pacific Northwest in this genre- and gender-blurring novel. Rough Trade follows Carrasco’s critically acclaimed debut The Best Bad Things and reimagines queer communities, the turbulent early days of modern media and medicine, and the pleasures—and price—of satisfying desire.]]> 384 Katrina Carrasco 0374272689 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.68 2024
author: Katrina Carrasco
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 203019749 259 Sarah Easter Collins 0593798333 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.74 2024
author: Sarah Easter Collins
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 125078589
Fifteen-year-old Ámbar has never known any parent other than her father, Víctor Mondragón, nor any life other than his. On any given Friday night, Ámbar longs to be at the arcade or a rock concert, but she’s more likely to be patching up Víctor’s latest bullet hole in a dingy motel or creating a new set of fake identities for the both of them.

When a tattooed mercenary kills Víctor’s best friend and vows that Víctor is next, father and daughter set off on a joyride across Argentina in search of bloody retribution. But Ámbar’s growing pains hurt worse than her beloved sawed-off shotgun’s kickback as she begins to question the structure of her world. How much is her father not telling her? Could her life ever be different? And will she survive long enough to find out?

It’s kill or be killed in this gritty, devastating coming-of-age thriller from the king of Argentine neo-noir.]]> 300 Nicolás Ferraro 1641295155 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.64 2021
author: Nicolás Ferraro
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 127279000 What if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thought so too? And what if the truth doesn't matter?

Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all and, if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. But after Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer.

It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie and its too-good looking host, Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one who did it.

The truth is out there, if we just listen.]]> 352 Amy Tintera 1250880319 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 4.06 2024
author: Amy Tintera
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 201751226 From the celebrated author of The Other Half comes a fabulous whodunit about two cold cases in which things go a fourteen-year-old girl and a multi-million-dollar pension fund.

Early one morning, a men’s rowing team discovers a body floating face down in the Thames. Many years before, the chief executive of a clothing manufacturer walked off with a multi-million dollar corporate retirement fund and disappeared without a trace. Now, the discovery of this body has reopened that cold case.

Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp has his own evening at the theater upended by the discovery of a dead body just a few seats away. Two decades ago, Eliza Chapel, a fourteen-year-old student at a girls boarding school in Cornwall, disappeared in the middle of the night under dubious circumstances. A second body and a second cold case reopened.

As DI Caius Beauchamp—along with his associates Matt Chung and Amy Noakes—investigates these parallel missing persons cases, he finds himself ensnared in the unexpected political machinations of a duke-in-waiting. This is yet another masterful mystery from Charlotte Vassell that is every bit as pointed as it is poignant.]]> 432 Charlotte Vassell 0593685970 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-thriller 3.87 2024
author: Charlotte Vassell
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, to-read-thriller
review:

]]> 193401835 The author analyses the operating styles of the country’s prime ministers through the prism of six decisions of historic significance. These are as the strategy that Indira Gandhi devised to return to power in 1980, after her humiliating defeat post the Emergency in 1977; the errors of judgment that led Rajiv Gandhi to undo the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Shah Bano case; V. P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission Report to save his government which forever changed the face of contemporary politics; P. V. Narasimha Rao’s masterful indecision that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid; the rapidly changing political scenarios that turned the avowed pacifist Atal Bihari Vajpayee into a nuclear hawk who greenlighted the testing of nuclear devices; and the mild and professorial Manmohan Singh, widely regarded as one of the country’s weakest prime ministers, who defied interest groups and foes within the political establishment to seal a historic nuclear deal with the United States and upgraded the bilateral relationship to a new level.
Based on hundreds of interviews that the author conducted with prime ministers, key figures in the political establishment, bureaucrats, aides, policymakers, and even fixers—the book provides remarkable insights that have been gleaned over forty years of high-level reporting on the national political scene.
How Prime Ministers Decide is an unparalleled book about modern Indian politics which will change the way we view how prime ministers govern the country.]]> 585 Neerja Chowdhury 9390652537 Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.50
author: Neerja Chowdhury
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
review:

]]> 61953668 An extraordinary chronicle of war and an occult story of love between a father and his son from one of Iraq’s most celebrated contemporary writers

“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.��

So begins Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate, a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict.

Muzafar-i Subhdam, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, Muzafar begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region.

An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths, The Last Pomegranate interrogates the origins and reverberations of atrocity. It also probes, with a graceful intelligence, unforgettable acts of mercy.]]> 322 Bachtyar Ali 1953861407 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-fiction 4.24 2002
author: Bachtyar Ali
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, to-read-fiction
review:

]]> 208952377
'A very special, very clever, very entertaining novel' Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha


It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the performance draws near and the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. And Lampo, whose ambitions have never stretched beyond having enough coin for the next jug of wine, finds his aspirations elevated, his heart entangled and his courage tested in ways he could never have imagined.

Glorious Exploits is an exhilarating and fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art; and - in the face of the Gods' apparent indifference - of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves.

'Madly ambitious, cathartic like all great tragedy, but shockingly funny too, Ferdia Lennon's outstandingly original début is just glorious' Emma Donoghue, author of Room]]> 270 Ferdia Lennon Saurabh 3 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.22 2024
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
review:

]]> 223142270
Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.]]> 464 Hisham Matar 0241987032 Saurabh 4 saurabh-s-book-shelf 4.34 2024
author: Hisham Matar
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: saurabh-s-book-shelf
review:

]]> 150778834 544 Jane Kamensky 1324002085 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 3.92
author: Jane Kamensky
name: Saurabh
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, to-read-non-fiction
review:

]]> 195853528 592 Amy Reading 1328595919 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.09
author: Amy Reading
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, to-read-non-fiction
review:

]]> 127282418
Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world.

Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.

Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry “I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me." Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, as conversations about gender and identity were really just starting. She never knew it, but she changed the world.

Packed with tales of luminaries and gossip and meticulous research, immersive and laced with Candy’s words and her friends' recollections, Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling is Candy's long-overdue return to the spotlight.

Includes 16 pages of color photographs]]> 432 Cynthia Carr 1250066352 Saurabh 0 to-read, to-read-non-fiction 4.18 2024
author: Cynthia Carr
name: Saurabh
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, to-read-non-fiction
review:

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