Malaha's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:58:41 -0700 60 Malaha's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg This House of Clay and Water 35051103
On her frequent visits to the dargah, Nida meets the gentle, flute-playing hijra Bhanggi, who sits under a bargadh tree and yearns for acceptance and affection, but is invariably shunned. A friendship-fragile, tentative and tender-develops between the two, both exiles within their own lives; but it flies in the face of all convention and cannot be allowed.

Faiqa Mansab's accomplished and dazzling debut novel explores the themes of love, betrayal and loss in the complex, changing world of today's Pakistan.]]> Faiqa Mansab Malaha 0 to-read 3.89 2017 This House of Clay and Water
author: Faiqa Mansab
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> Life is Elsewhere 44559 The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed, and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a sombre farce.]]> 432 Milan Kundera 0060997028 Malaha 0 to-read 4.00 1973 Life is Elsewhere
author: Milan Kundera
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Malaha 0 currently-reading 4.15 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Urdu Ki Akhri Kitaab / اردو کی آخری کتاب]]> 2795347 ابن انشاء کو مت پڑھ
ورنہ تیرا بیڑا پار نہ ہوگا
اور ہم سے کوئی
نتائج کا ذمہ دار نہ ہوگا]]> 160 Ibn e Insha Malaha 3 4.31 1971 Urdu Ki Akhri Kitaab / اردو کی آخری کتاب
author: Ibn e Insha
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2026/09/10
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]]> Notes from the Underground 220306450 Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes — moral, religious, political and social — that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works. Notes from the Underground, then, aside from its own compelling qualities, offers readers an ideal introduction to the creative imagination, profundity and uncanny psychological penetration of one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction.]]> 148 Fyodor Dostoevsky 9362140969 Malaha 0 currently-reading 4.54 1864 Notes from the Underground
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1864
rating: 0
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]]> Baab e dahar / بابِ دہر 216673093
وہ پانچ لوگ دہر کے ایک باب کو بند کرنے والے تھے ۔۔

ایک باب جس کے پیچھے رنجش، خلش، کسک، آزردگی دفن تھی۔۔

مگر مدفن رازوں میں، ایک جذبہ سازش کا بھی تھا جسے وہ پانچ لوگ فراموش کرچکے تھے۔۔

بابِ دہر تمہارے چاہ لینے سے بند نہیں ہوجاتے۔۔۔

جذبات دیمک ہیں، تخت کھاجاتے ہیں۔۔]]> 705 Mehrulnisa Shahmeer Malaha 0 currently-reading 4.11 Baab e dahar / بابِ دہر
author: Mehrulnisa Shahmeer
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.11
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]]> Book Lovers 58690308 One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....

Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.]]> 377 Emily Henry 0593334833 Malaha 4 4.06 2022 Book Lovers
author: Emily Henry
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2026/08/31
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]]> Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1) 28446947 Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Here comes Autumn.]]> 264 Ali Smith 0241207002 Malaha 0 to-read 3.66 2016 Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1)
author: Ali Smith
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> Leo the Lop 318426 32 Stephen Cosgrove 0843177233 Malaha 0 to-read 4.18 1978 Leo the Lop
author: Stephen Cosgrove
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/24
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]]> Pride and Prejudice 1885 279 Jane Austen 1441341706 Malaha 0 to-read 4.28 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 0
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]]> Matilda 39988 “The Trunchbull” is no match for Matilda!

Matilda is a little girl who is far too good to be true. At age five-and-a-half she's knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she's a super-nerd and the teacher's pet. But everything is not perfect in Matilda's world...

For starters she has two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there's the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss ("The") Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge.

Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter-pilot, chocolate historian, and medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and many more brilliant stories. He remains the World's No. 1 Storyteller.]]> 240 Roald Dahl 043512398X Malaha 0 to-read 4.34 1988 Matilda
author: Roald Dahl
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/24
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]]> The Great Gatsby 41733839 Alternate covers of this ISBN can be found here, here and here.

James L. W. West III to include the author’s final revisions and features a note on the composition and text, a personal foreword by Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan—and a new introduction by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald Malaha 4 to-read 3.94 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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date added: 2026/08/20
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]]> Normal People 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Malaha 5
Love? Absolutely. The chemistry, compatibility and comfort Connell and Marianne shared were lighting up the pages.
Class divide, social hierarchy and capitalism? Yes, in the most subtle yet obvious way possible.
Mental health? In the most authentic way. The ugly parts, the hopeful parts and everything in between.
Childhood trauma and its consequences? In the bravest way possible. Especially through Marianne. Her relationships apart from Connell, her preferences for pleasure, her understanding of love and intimacy, everything spoke of her childhood. Connell’s fear of judgment and social anxiety stem not just from his class but from his birth too.

The miscommunication, the deprecating of mental health, and friendships across five years seemed real and honest. So did the choices people make for love, and the places those choices take them. Love that could be both a bane and a boon. Love that leads to redemption, rejuvenation.

Normal People cannot be a simple one-time read. I see myself reaching out to read this in the future, many, many times.

Also, I love how Sally’s characters have personality in them. You can see their tastes, their aesthetics and most importantly, their politics. Just like in Beautiful World, Where Are You, in this book as well her characters have an ideology, a view and an understanding of the world.
I loved, loved how Marianne and Connell are on the right side of history, with their pro-Palestine stance.]]> 3.81 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/20
date added: 2026/08/20
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What doesn’t this book touch upon?

Love? Absolutely. The chemistry, compatibility and comfort Connell and Marianne shared were lighting up the pages.
Class divide, social hierarchy and capitalism? Yes, in the most subtle yet obvious way possible.
Mental health? In the most authentic way. The ugly parts, the hopeful parts and everything in between.
Childhood trauma and its consequences? In the bravest way possible. Especially through Marianne. Her relationships apart from Connell, her preferences for pleasure, her understanding of love and intimacy, everything spoke of her childhood. Connell’s fear of judgment and social anxiety stem not just from his class but from his birth too.

The miscommunication, the deprecating of mental health, and friendships across five years seemed real and honest. So did the choices people make for love, and the places those choices take them. Love that could be both a bane and a boon. Love that leads to redemption, rejuvenation.

Normal People cannot be a simple one-time read. I see myself reaching out to read this in the future, many, many times.

Also, I love how Sally’s characters have personality in them. You can see their tastes, their aesthetics and most importantly, their politics. Just like in Beautiful World, Where Are You, in this book as well her characters have an ideology, a view and an understanding of the world.
I loved, loved how Marianne and Connell are on the right side of history, with their pro-Palestine stance.
]]> Essays and Aphorisms 19510 Parerga and Paralipomena, which he published in 1851. He depicts humanity as locked in a struggle beyond good and evil, each individual absolutely free within a Godless world in which art, morality and self-awareness are our only salvation. This innovative and pessimistic view proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, affecting the work of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein among others.]]> 240 Arthur Schopenhauer 0140442278 Malaha 0 to-read 4.17 1851 Essays and Aphorisms
author: Arthur Schopenhauer
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1851
rating: 0
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]]> Giovanni’s Room 406235 178 James Baldwin Malaha 5 a powerful, short and beautiful beautiful prose.]]> 4.38 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/18
date added: 2026/08/18
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a bleak, gorgeous read. Much more than just a gay lovestory. It was about self identity and self-deception, expatriatism, love that makes you go bare, that makes you feel and do things you'll hate yourself for, sexuality, gender and social expectations.
a powerful, short and beautiful beautiful prose.
]]> Talking at Night 62583508
They’re opposites in every way. She overthinks everything; he is her twin brother’s wild and unpredictable friend. But over secret walks home and late-night phone calls, they become closer—destined to be one another’s great love story.

Until, one day, tragedy strikes, and their future together is shattered.

But as the years roll on, Will and Rosie can’t help but find their way back to each other. Time and again, they come close to rekindling what might have been.

What do you do when the one person you should forget is the one you just can’t let go?]]> 400 Claire Daverley 0593653483 Malaha 0 to-read 3.86 2023 Talking at Night
author: Claire Daverley
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/15
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]]> People in Love 214936982 A long-lost friend reappears and ignites an old spark, leading to an emotionally fraught love triangle.

One bright blue day, on a bench by the river, Nora’s partner Robin proposes.

It is unexpected; they’d always agreed that they didn’t need a wedding. But after a decade of in-jokes, dancing in the low-lit kitchen and sharing morning toast in bed, Nora says yes. Why wouldn’t she?

The answer lands on the night of their engagement party, when Bren turns up on her doorstep.

Growing up, Bren and Nora were the sort of best friends who everyone swore would end up together. But when a sudden heartbreak turned their lives upside down, Bren left, Nora stayed, and the silent longing between them remained unspoken.

Now, he’s back, and their tentative yet undeniable spark reignites, forcing Nora to ask herself: How can you know your heart, if it feels like it’s split in two?

Tender and compelling, People in Love is a story about what-ifs and maybes, and the moments of misunderstanding that can shape our lives. It’s a book about living one life while musing on another, exploring how our choices shape our relationships and inform our regrets, and revealing, in the end, that the real love story is not always the one you'd expect.]]> 366 Claire Daverley 140595518X Malaha 0 to-read 3.76 2026 People in Love
author: Claire Daverley
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> Conversations on Love 57028269
'One of this summer's most buzzed about books (and one that might just change your life)' Sunday Times

After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?

In Conversations on Love she began to find the answers:

Philippa Perry on falling in love slowly
Dolly Alderton on vulnerability
Stephen Grosz on accepting change
Candice Carty-Williams on friendship
Lisa Taddeo on the loneliness of loss
Diana Evans on parenthood
Emily Nagoski on the science of sex
Alain de Botton on the psychology of being alone
Esther Perel on unrealistic expectations
Roxane Gay on redefining romance
and many more...

'A gorgeous, richly layered book about all forms of love. You can pick it up and turn to any page - literally any - and find a gem to soothe and fortify your soul' Pandora Sykes, Sunday Times bestselling author of 'How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?'

'Hopeful and uplifting... this deep dive into the human heart will expand and enrich your perspective on love' Evening Standard

'This eclectic and heartwarming collection explores love in all its forms, from romantic and parental love to friendship and loss'Observer

'Conversations on Love is a glorious celebration of human vulnerability and connection. It has made me laugh, shed tears, think deeply. I want every person I love to read this book' Dr Kathryn Mannix, Sunday Times bestselling author of WITH THE END IN MIND]]> 320 Natasha Lunn 0241448735 Malaha 0 to-read 4.19 2021 Conversations on Love
author: Natasha Lunn
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
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]]> Essays in Love 23427 249 Alain de Botton 0330334360 Malaha 0 to-read 3.91 1993 Essays in Love
author: Alain de Botton
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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]]> A Grief Observed 26077627
Written in longhand in notebooks that Lewis found in his home, A Grief Observed probes the "mad midnight moments" of Lewis's mourning and loss, moments in which he questioned what he had previously believed about life and death, marriage, and even God. Indecision and self-pity assailed Lewis. "We are under the harrow and can't escape," he writes. "I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace." Writing A Grief Observed as "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve," he came to recognize that "bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."

Lewis writes his statement of faith with precision, humor, and grace. Yet neither is Lewis reluctant to confess his continuing doubts and his awareness of his own human frailty. This is precisely the quality which suggests that A Grief Observed may become "among the great devotional books of our age."]]> 76 C.S. Lewis Malaha 0 to-read 4.29 1961 A Grief Observed
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower]]> 28385 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lies his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are to dominate the narrator’s life—the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.
First time in Penguin Classics


A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition


The first completely new translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s, following Lydia Davis's brilliant translation of Swann's Way


 ]]> 533 Marcel Proust 0143039075 Malaha 0 to-read 4.41 1919 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
author: Marcel Proust
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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]]> Carpe Diem / کارپ ڈائم 222247844 926 Rabia Khan Malaha 4 3.99 Carpe Diem / کارپ ڈائم
author: Rabia Khan
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 4
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]]> Les Misérables 24280 1488 Victor Hugo 0451525264 Malaha 0 to-read 4.19 1862 Les Misérables
author: Victor Hugo
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1862
rating: 0
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]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of a mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.]]> 417 Gabriel García Márquez Malaha 0 to-read 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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]]> Lord of the Flies 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 Malaha 0 to-read 3.71 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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]]> Jane Eyre 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

A gothic masterpiece of tempestuous passions and dark secrets, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis in Penguin Classics.

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 Malaha 0 to-read 4.15 1847 Jane Eyre
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1847
rating: 0
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]]> Conversations with Friends 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth.]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Malaha 0 to-read 3.72 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> The Year of Magical Thinking 7815 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A landmark work about grief, love, and survival from one of America’s most iconic writers

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” –The New York Times

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana Roo, fall ill with septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital when John suffered a fatal heart attack. In that one moment, their partnership of forty years came to an end.

This powerful narrative is Didion's “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

“Didion has transformed grief into literature.” —The Guardian]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Malaha 0 to-read 3.93 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking
author: Joan Didion
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays]]> 56898270 Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for granted—between ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artwork—which turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.

Described as “a 21st-century Virginia Woolf” in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.

This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.]]> 304 Siri Hustvedt 1982176393 Malaha 0 to-read 3.88 2021 Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
author: Siri Hustvedt
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
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]]> Simple Passion 58678702 67 Annie Ernaux 1644213575 Malaha 0 to-read 3.95 1991 Simple Passion
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> All About Love: New Visions 17607 All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame.

For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.]]> 240 bell hooks 0688168442 Malaha 0 to-read 4.02 1999 All About Love: New Visions
author: bell hooks
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> Second Place 54785558 From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.

A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.

With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.]]> 186 Rachel Cusk 0374279225 Malaha 0 to-read 3.68 2021 Second Place
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> Anxious People 49127718
Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.

Includes short story - The Last Round of Golf]]> 336 Fredrik Backman 198216963X Malaha 0 to-read 4.15 2019 Anxious People
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> The Road to Tender Hearts 218460347 A darkly comic and warm-hearted novel about an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush—bringing together his adult daughter, two orphaned kids, and a cat who can predict death—from the beloved author of Rabbit Cake and Unlikely Animals

At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.

But when PJ reads an obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.

Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also figures he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter, adrift in her 20s, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.

This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a second shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.]]> 384 Annie Hartnett 0593873440 Malaha 0 to-read 4.32 2025 The Road to Tender Hearts
author: Annie Hartnett
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident.

The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Malaha 0 to-read 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/10
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]]> All the Lovers in the Night 59336625
As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.]]> 224 Mieko Kawakami 1609456998 Malaha 5 It was about paralyzing loneliness, stagnant adulthood, social expectations imposed on women, about trauma that unconsciously dictates life and about women who are called awkwardly weird, about being Fuyuko.]]> 3.67 2011 All the Lovers in the Night
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/10
date added: 2026/08/10
shelves:
review:
a perfect non-western sadgirl book 🥀
It was about paralyzing loneliness, stagnant adulthood, social expectations imposed on women, about trauma that unconsciously dictates life and about women who are called awkwardly weird, about being Fuyuko.
]]> The Tell-Tale Heart 899492 A man confronts himself and an unknown listener with his desire to murder an old man.

In this classic psychological thriller, the reader will find many more questions than answers. Even though this is one of Poe's shortest stories, nevertheless it has become one of his most highest regarded works. It is a profound and, at times, ambiguous investigation of the paranoia that may lie within the depths of one man's mind...]]> 31 Edgar Allan Poe 0871917726 Malaha 0 to-read 4.27 1843 The Tell-Tale Heart
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1843
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Stories and Poems]]> 23919 Complete Works does not pretend to be final. It does claim to make Poe's work readily available in an attractive format, to have been carfully prepared, intelligently arranged and reasonably priced. In short, it proposes to put into the hands of the general public the entire range of work of one of the greatest of American writers in a most convenient and readable volume that will be at once popular and reliable.
--H.A.

Contents:
- Introduction by Hervey Allen
TALES
- The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall
- The Gold-Bug
- The Balloon-Hoax
- Von Kempelen and His Discovery
- Mesmeric Revelation
- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
- The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
- MS. Found in a Bottle
- A Descent into the Maelström
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- The Mystery of Marie Roget
- The Purloined Letter
- The Black Cat
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Premature Burial
- The Masque of the Red Death
- The Cask of Amontillado
- The Imp of the Perverse
- The Island of the Fay
- The Oval Portrait
- The Assignation
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
- The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.
- How to Write a Blackwood Article
- A Predicament
- Mystification
- X-ing a Paragrab
- Diddling
- The Angel of the Odd
- Mellonta Tauta
- Loss of Breath
- The Man that Was Used Up
- The Business Man
- Maelzel's Chess-Player
- The Power of Words
- The Colloquy of Monos and Una
- The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion
- Shadow — A Parable
- Silence — A Fable
- Philosophy of Furniture
- A Tale of Jerusalem
- The Sphinx
- The Man of the Crowd
- Never Bet the Devil Your Head
- “Thou Art the Man”
- Hop-Frog
- Four Beasts in One; The Homo-Camelopard
- Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling
- Bon-Bon
- Some Words with a Mummy
- Review of Stephens' “Arabia Petrzea”
- Magazine-Writing — Peter Snook
- The Quacks of Helicon — A Satire
- Astoria
- The Domain of Arnheim, or The Landscape Garden
- Landor's Cottage
- William Wilson
- Berenice
- Eleonora
- Ligeia
- Morella
- Metzengerstein
- A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
- The Spectacles
- The Duc De L'Omelette
- The Oblong Box
- King Pest
- Three Sundays in a Week
- The Devil in the Belfry
- Lionizing
- Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
────────────
- Preface to the Poems
- The Poetic Principle
- The Rationale of Verse
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
- The Raven
- Lenore
- Hymn
- A Valentine
- The Coliseum
- To Helen
- To — —
- Ulalume
- The Bells
- An Enigma
- Annabel Lee
- To My Mother
- The Haunted Palace
- The Conqueror Worm
- To F—S S. O—D
- To One in Paradise
- The Valley of Unrest
- The City in the Sea
- The Sleeper
- Silence
- A Dream Within a Dream
- Dream-Land
- To Zante
- Eulalie
- Eldorado
- Israfel
- For Annie
- To —
- Bridal Ballad
- To F—
- Scenes from “Politian”
POEMS WRITTEN IN YOUTH
- Sonnet — To Science
- Al Aaraaf
- To the River —
- Tamerlane
- To —
- A Dream
- Romance
- Fairy-Land
- The Lake — To —
- Song
- To M. L. S—
- Spirits of the Dead
- To Helen
- Evening Star
- “The Happiest Day”
- Imitation
- Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius. Translation from the Greek
- Dreams
- “In Youth I Have Known One”
- A Paean
- To Isadore
- Alone]]> 821 Edgar Allan Poe 0385074077 Malaha 0 to-read 4.39 1849 The Complete Stories and Poems
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1849
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings]]> 391729
-The Tell-Tale Heart
-The Black Cat
-The Cask of Amontillado
-The Fall of the House of Usher
-The Masque of the Red Death
-The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
-Ligeia
-The Murders in the Rue Morgue
-The Purloined Letter
-A Descent into the Maelstrom
-The Pit and the Pendulum
-Ms. Found in a Bottle
-The Premature Burial
-William Wilson
-Eleonara
-Silence-A Fable
-The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Here too is a major selection of what Poe characterized as the passion of his life, his poems:

-Stanzas
-Romance
-To Helen
-Israfel
-The City in the Sea
-The Sleeper
-The Valley of Unrest
-Lenore
-The Raven
-A Valentine
-Ulanume-A Ballad
-For Annie
-Annabel Lee
-The Bells
-Alone]]> 448 Edgar Allan Poe 0553212281 Malaha 0 to-read 4.20 1843 The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1843
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove]]> 190576
Originally rendered by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from an early and unreliable French edition, Proust’s masterpiece has now been flawlessly translated by Terence Kilmartin in this acclaimed version.]]> 1056 Marcel Proust 0394711823 Malaha 0 to-read 4.29 1913 Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
author: Marcel Proust
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1913
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/07/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 12749 In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust’s masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis’s internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way.

Swann’s Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbours, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age—satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition—Swann’s Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.]]> 468 Marcel Proust 0142437964 Malaha 0 to-read 4.12 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1913
rating: 0
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]]> The Years 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Malaha 0 to-read 4.21 2008 The Years
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> Shame 124950408
With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.]]> 112 Annie Ernaux Malaha 0 to-read 3.71 1997 Shame
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> A Girl's Story 53443227 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years.

In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,” bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.]]> 160 Annie Ernaux Malaha 0 to-read 4.00 2016 A Girl's Story
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> A Woman's Story 59452779 104 Annie Ernaux Malaha 0 to-read 4.29 1988 A Woman's Story
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> The Lover 275 117 Marguerite Duras Malaha 0 to-read 3.76 1984 The Lover
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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]]> Clear Light of Day 35997 Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A "rich, Chekhovian novel" about family and forgiveness from the acclaimed author of Fire on the Mountain (The New Yorker).

At the heart of this wonderful novel are the moving relationships between the estranged members of the Das family. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface, blending into a domestic drama that leads to beautiful and profound moments of self-understanding.

Set in the vividly portrayed environs of Old Delhi, "Clear Light of Day does what only the very best novels can do: it totally submerges us. It also takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won't be able to climb out again" (New York Times Book Review).]]> 183 Anita Desai 0618074511 Malaha 3 did-not-finish 3.72 1980 Clear Light of Day
author: Anita Desai
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1980
rating: 3
read at: 2025/09/11
date added: 2026/06/27
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> The Nine-Chambered Heart 36396222 216 Janice Pariat 9352773799 Malaha 5 Some books tell a story. Others create an experience. This novel belongs firmly in the latter category.
The premise itself is fascinating: a woman's life is told through the eyes of nine different people who met her at different stages of her life. With the exception of her childhood teacher, every narrator seems to have loved her in some form, romantically, physically, emotionally, or perhaps all at once. Yet despite spending an entire book learning about her, she remains wonderfully elusive.
The absence of names is also more important than it first appears. Normally, names anchor us in a concrete reality. Here, the lack of names turns the characters into archetypes such as the teacher, the butcher, the florist, and the sailor, while still feeling deeply individual. It gives the book a fable-like quality.

Each narrator describes the same woman, yet every portrait feels distinct. To her teacher (the saint) , she is a sharp, inquisitive, abandoned child. To the butcher, she is "a rare bird visiting a garden." To the caretaker, she is "a woman to whom something is always about to happen." The undertaker remembers her as kind, brave, generous, and prone to strange quietude. The professor sees someone "as beautiful as light splitting through glass." The florist remembers a woman with "a heart as open as the sky." The crusader sees ideas bolting from her like wild horses. The lighthouse keeper sees beauty, talent, selfishness, impatience, generosity, escapism, and contradiction. The sailor sees a performer, a hedonist, someone with darkness hidden beneath elegance.

What is remarkable is that none of these descriptions contradict one another. Instead, they accumulate. With each chapter, the woman becomes larger, richer, and more complex. We never arrive at a definitive version of her because the novel understands that no person can ever be fully known.

As for the woman herself, I think I've identified the central tension in her character:

She is simultaneously hungry for connection and incapable of staying fully inside it.

Her childhood abandonment doesn't make her incapable of love. Quite the opposite. She loves intensely. But she seems drawn toward movement, possibility, and escape. She wants love without confinement, permanence without stagnation. That contradiction is probably why so many people remember her so vividly.

My favorite relationships are telling as well.

The butcher represents love stripped of sophistication, immediate, physical, and painfully real. Their relationship is built on mutual love, desire, and discomfort. He sees her as a rare bird because he encounters her as wonder.

The caretaker perhaps loves her most honestly, asking for little in return. He sees someone to whom "something is always about to happen" because he experiences her as possibility.

The florist offers the romance of being chosen. He sees openness because that is what he receives from her.

The lighthouse keeper represents the reality of loving someone once the ideal has faded. He sees contradictions, beautiful, selfish, generous, escapist, because marriage forces him to confront the whole person rather than an idealized version. As the man she marries, he perhaps offers the most complete portrait of her, confronting both the woman and the myth.

Together, these relationships almost chart the stages of love itself.
The writing deserves special mention. This is some of the most poetic prose I have read in a long time. The language is melodic, elegant, and often breathtakingly beautiful. There is no tightly wound plot driving the novel forward. There are no dramatic twists, no heavy exposition, and very little dialogue. Yet I was completely captivated from the very first page. The prose itself becomes the engine of the book.

Some of my favorite lines include:
"The ones we pretend to ignore are the ones we're most aware of."
"How precisely we know how to hurt the ones we love."
"Perhaps it's the only way to retain it. Love. To never have it happen. To love, otherwise, is always to lose. And isn't it true? That one imagined kiss is worth a thousand real ones."
"I realize there doesn't exist a body with no scars."
"How content we are to grasp at too little."

These lines capture the spirit of the novel, its fascination with love, longing, memory, grief, and the ways people leave their marks upon one another.

What stayed with me most after finishing the book was not the plot, but the fact that the novel is less interested in telling us what happened than in preserving the memory of a woman who was many things to many people and never entirely belonged to any of them.
It is a rare, beautifully executed novel, poetic, unconventional, and deeply affecting. A lovely reading experience from beginning to end.]]> 3.50 2017 The Nine-Chambered Heart
author: Janice Pariat
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/22
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves:
review:
One of its kind i believe.
Some books tell a story. Others create an experience. This novel belongs firmly in the latter category.
The premise itself is fascinating: a woman's life is told through the eyes of nine different people who met her at different stages of her life. With the exception of her childhood teacher, every narrator seems to have loved her in some form, romantically, physically, emotionally, or perhaps all at once. Yet despite spending an entire book learning about her, she remains wonderfully elusive.
The absence of names is also more important than it first appears. Normally, names anchor us in a concrete reality. Here, the lack of names turns the characters into archetypes such as the teacher, the butcher, the florist, and the sailor, while still feeling deeply individual. It gives the book a fable-like quality.

Each narrator describes the same woman, yet every portrait feels distinct. To her teacher (the saint) , she is a sharp, inquisitive, abandoned child. To the butcher, she is "a rare bird visiting a garden." To the caretaker, she is "a woman to whom something is always about to happen." The undertaker remembers her as kind, brave, generous, and prone to strange quietude. The professor sees someone "as beautiful as light splitting through glass." The florist remembers a woman with "a heart as open as the sky." The crusader sees ideas bolting from her like wild horses. The lighthouse keeper sees beauty, talent, selfishness, impatience, generosity, escapism, and contradiction. The sailor sees a performer, a hedonist, someone with darkness hidden beneath elegance.

What is remarkable is that none of these descriptions contradict one another. Instead, they accumulate. With each chapter, the woman becomes larger, richer, and more complex. We never arrive at a definitive version of her because the novel understands that no person can ever be fully known.

As for the woman herself, I think I've identified the central tension in her character:

She is simultaneously hungry for connection and incapable of staying fully inside it.

Her childhood abandonment doesn't make her incapable of love. Quite the opposite. She loves intensely. But she seems drawn toward movement, possibility, and escape. She wants love without confinement, permanence without stagnation. That contradiction is probably why so many people remember her so vividly.

My favorite relationships are telling as well.

The butcher represents love stripped of sophistication, immediate, physical, and painfully real. Their relationship is built on mutual love, desire, and discomfort. He sees her as a rare bird because he encounters her as wonder.

The caretaker perhaps loves her most honestly, asking for little in return. He sees someone to whom "something is always about to happen" because he experiences her as possibility.

The florist offers the romance of being chosen. He sees openness because that is what he receives from her.

The lighthouse keeper represents the reality of loving someone once the ideal has faded. He sees contradictions, beautiful, selfish, generous, escapist, because marriage forces him to confront the whole person rather than an idealized version. As the man she marries, he perhaps offers the most complete portrait of her, confronting both the woman and the myth.

Together, these relationships almost chart the stages of love itself.
The writing deserves special mention. This is some of the most poetic prose I have read in a long time. The language is melodic, elegant, and often breathtakingly beautiful. There is no tightly wound plot driving the novel forward. There are no dramatic twists, no heavy exposition, and very little dialogue. Yet I was completely captivated from the very first page. The prose itself becomes the engine of the book.

Some of my favorite lines include:
"The ones we pretend to ignore are the ones we're most aware of."
"How precisely we know how to hurt the ones we love."
"Perhaps it's the only way to retain it. Love. To never have it happen. To love, otherwise, is always to lose. And isn't it true? That one imagined kiss is worth a thousand real ones."
"I realize there doesn't exist a body with no scars."
"How content we are to grasp at too little."

These lines capture the spirit of the novel, its fascination with love, longing, memory, grief, and the ways people leave their marks upon one another.

What stayed with me most after finishing the book was not the plot, but the fact that the novel is less interested in telling us what happened than in preserving the memory of a woman who was many things to many people and never entirely belonged to any of them.
It is a rare, beautifully executed novel, poetic, unconventional, and deeply affecting. A lovely reading experience from beginning to end.
]]> <![CDATA[We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya]]> 200647009 New 272 Janice Pariat 9390514266 Malaha 0 to-read 3.48 We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya
author: Janice Pariat
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.48
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Boats on Land 16069752 Boats on Land is a collection of short stories that offer a new way of looking at the world, and, in particular, India’s little-known northeast. Set in and around Shillong, Cherrapunjee and pockets of Assam, these tales are shaped against a larger historical canvas of the early days of the British Raj, the World Wars, conversions to Christianity, and the missionaries.

Spanning a sweep of centuries, from the mid-1800s to the present day, the stories work as a historical, sociological documentation of a place and its people, interweaving the quotidian and the mythic, the mundane and the extraordinary.

This is a world in which the everyday is infused with folklore and a deep belief in the supernatural. Here, a girl dreams of being a firebird. An artist watches souls turn into trees. A man shape-shifts into a tiger. Another is bewitched by water fairies. Political struggles and social unrest interweave with fireside tales and age-old superstitions.]]> 296 Janice Pariat 818400074X Malaha 0 to-read 4.09 2012 Boats on Land
author: Janice Pariat
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[October Junction (Preview Edition) (Hindi Edition)]]> 43255476 25 Divya Prakash Dubey Malaha 1
October Junction is a weird book. I don't want to be rude but I have to be honest, i didn't like it. The story was supremely weak, the characters were shallow and there was no depth to the writing.
It felt as though a 14 -15 year old had written it after watching films like One Day. The book seems to have been written to appeal to teenagers or readers with little exposure to quality Hindi literature. Both protagonists were poorly developed and there was absolutely no chemistry between them.
At times, it felt like the writer had written the book simply for the sake of writing it. Even the ending didn't make much sense.
That said, the book was oddly gripping for some reason😂
I finished it in a day, though it was only around 150 pages long. The chapters were short and somewhat abrupt, yet easy to read, which kept the pages turning despite the book's many shortcomings.]]> 4.05 October Junction (Preview Edition) (Hindi Edition)
author: Divya Prakash Dubey
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2026/06/13
date added: 2026/06/13
shelves:
review:
0.5 ⭐️ actually.

October Junction is a weird book. I don't want to be rude but I have to be honest, i didn't like it. The story was supremely weak, the characters were shallow and there was no depth to the writing.
It felt as though a 14 -15 year old had written it after watching films like One Day. The book seems to have been written to appeal to teenagers or readers with little exposure to quality Hindi literature. Both protagonists were poorly developed and there was absolutely no chemistry between them.
At times, it felt like the writer had written the book simply for the sake of writing it. Even the ending didn't make much sense.
That said, the book was oddly gripping for some reason😂
I finished it in a day, though it was only around 150 pages long. The chapters were short and somewhat abrupt, yet easy to read, which kept the pages turning despite the book's many shortcomings.
]]> <![CDATA[As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow]]> 57390604
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.

But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.

Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.]]> 417 Zoulfa Katouh 0316351377 Malaha 3 In this book, the author hauntingly personifies grief and fear through Khawf. And Khawf as a manifestation of fear was one of the novel’s strongest devices, he wasn’t merely anxiety, he felt like accumulated trauma walking beside Salama all the time.

I also really liked how Kenan and Salama referred to Syria as “her” and “she”; it was beautiful and deeply emotional. The detail about Syria being spoken of as “she” and “her” turns the country from a political headline into someone beloved, wounded and mourned. It makes exile and destruction feel personal rather than abstract.

Overall, the book was heavy with grief, yet it was impossible to put down.
Layla’s death was something I saw coming, but I was still shocked by the way it was revealed. It was hauntingly sad and devastating.
I really liked Salama and Kenan together, though chemistry was missing.

This was my first young adult fiction novel and also my first halal romance, and it delivered well. I liked how the author did not let the love story overpower the grief and tragedy, nor let the tragedy overshadow the love story. Both aspects were balanced eloquently.
This is also the first book for which I read the entire acknowledgements and author’s note. It was lovely.]]> 4.43 2022 As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
author: Zoulfa Katouh
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2026/06/12
date added: 2026/06/12
shelves:
review:
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow is a story of hope, resilience, love, and loss. May no country ever go through what Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Kashmir have gone through.
In this book, the author hauntingly personifies grief and fear through Khawf. And Khawf as a manifestation of fear was one of the novel’s strongest devices, he wasn’t merely anxiety, he felt like accumulated trauma walking beside Salama all the time.

I also really liked how Kenan and Salama referred to Syria as “her” and “she”; it was beautiful and deeply emotional. The detail about Syria being spoken of as “she” and “her” turns the country from a political headline into someone beloved, wounded and mourned. It makes exile and destruction feel personal rather than abstract.

Overall, the book was heavy with grief, yet it was impossible to put down.
Layla’s death was something I saw coming, but I was still shocked by the way it was revealed. It was hauntingly sad and devastating.
I really liked Salama and Kenan together, though chemistry was missing.

This was my first young adult fiction novel and also my first halal romance, and it delivered well. I liked how the author did not let the love story overpower the grief and tragedy, nor let the tragedy overshadow the love story. Both aspects were balanced eloquently.
This is also the first book for which I read the entire acknowledgements and author’s note. It was lovely.
]]> The Correspondent 223001257 “Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.]]> 285 Virginia Evans 0593798430 Malaha 0 to-read 4.41 2025 The Correspondent
author: Virginia Evans
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> She Wore Red Trainers 18528169 256 Na'ima B. Robert 1847740650 Malaha 0 to-read 3.91 2014 She Wore Red Trainers
author: Na'ima B. Robert
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History]]> 36645450 304 Nur Masalha 1786992736 Malaha 0 to-read 4.02 2021 Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
author: Nur Masalha
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> If You Could See the Sun 60099660 actually invisible.
 
When her parents drop the news that they can no longer afford her tuition, even with the scholarship, Alice hatches a plan to monetize her strange new power—she’ll discover the scandalous secrets her classmates want to know, for a price.
 
But as the tasks escalate from petty scandals to actual crimes, Alice must decide if it’s worth losing her conscience—or even her life.

In this genre-bending YA debut, a Chinese American girl monetizes her strange new invisibility powers by discovering and selling her wealthy classmates’ most scandalous secrets.]]> 346 Ann Liang 1335915842 Malaha 0 to-read 3.99 2022 If You Could See the Sun
author: Ann Liang
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Winter of Our Discontent 4796
The Nobel Committee, in awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature, stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American."]]> 291 John Steinbeck 0143039482 Malaha 0 to-read 4.01 1961 The Winter of Our Discontent
author: John Steinbeck
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Walking on the Ceiling 37655491
"I fell in love with this book." -- Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation

A mesmerizing novel set in Paris and a changing Istanbul, about a young Turkish woman grappling with her past and her complicated relationship with a famous British writer.

After her mother's death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.

M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him. She recounts the idyllic landscapes of her past, mythical family meals, and her elaborate childhood games. As she does so, she also begins to confront her mother's silence and anger, her father's death, and the growing unrest in Istanbul. Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu's fear of revealing too much to M. and of giving too much of herself and her Istanbul away. Most of all, she fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she's told to protect herself from her memories.

A wise and unguarded glimpse into a young woman's coming into her own, Walking on the Ceiling is about memory, the pleasure of invention, and those places, real and imagined, we can't escape.]]> 210 Aysegül Savas 0525537414 Malaha 0 to-read 3.55 Walking on the Ceiling
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.55
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> White on White 54321728
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes. She rents an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.

What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas Malaha 0 to-read 3.67 2021 White on White
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Long Distance: Stories 217387783 A masterful and tender debut collection of stories from the acclaimed author of The Anthropologists, about distance and closeness in the age of connectivity.

"An exceptionally elegant, intelligent, and original writer.” -Sigrid Nunez
"She is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows." -Bryan Washington
"The rigor of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald." -Catherine Lacey
"One of my favorite writers." -Katie Kitamura

A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long-distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the American taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can't resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship.

Long Distance showcases Savas's devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often center on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they've left behind.]]> 240 Aysegül Savas 1639733108 Malaha 0 to-read 3.94 2025 Long Distance: Stories
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” 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, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 183 Aysegül Savas 163973306X Malaha 0 to-read 3.83 2024 The Anthropologists
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender]]> 199798928 400 Shehnaz Haqqani 086154840X Malaha 0 to-read 4.14 Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender
author: Shehnaz Haqqani
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Loved One 221473262 336 Aisha Muharrar 0593655842 Malaha 0 to-read 3.64 2025 Loved One
author: Aisha Muharrar
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage]]> 231108670 It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.

In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.

With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.]]> 241 Belle Burden 0593733312 Malaha 0 to-read 4.02 2026 Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
author: Belle Burden
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Heart the Lover 228110489
She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined - with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.

Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.]]> 256 Lily King 0802165176 Malaha 0 to-read 4.13 2025 Heart the Lover
author: Lily King
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Writers & Lovers 45289222 Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.]]> 320 Lily King Malaha 0 to-read 3.93 2020 Writers & Lovers
author: Lily King
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The One (Dark Future #1) 40670312 How far would you go to find The One?

A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner the one you are genetically made for.

That’s the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.

Now five very different people have received the notification that they’ve been “Matched.” They’re each about to meet their one true love. But “happily ever after” isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others…

A word-of-mouth hit in the United Kingdom, The One is a fascinating novel that shows how even the simplest discoveries can have complicated consequences.]]> 418 John Marrs Malaha 0 to-read 4.07 2016 The One (Dark Future #1)
author: John Marrs
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Wedding People 198902277
Phoebe is there because she’s dreamed of coming for years. She hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is a nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.]]> 367 Alison Espach Malaha 5 author's description to the beautiful scenaries, roads ans hotel is wonderfully real. characters are so well written that each of them stands out. There isn’t a single character who feels unlikable, and the writer gives us small windows into their lives, allowing us to understand them. Phoebe's depression, hopelessness, grief was so authentically beautiful and messy. her loss and her fight with it was as raw as possible.
And man! the chemistry between Phoebe and Gary was burning off the pages. you could feel the tension, the spark!💥
It could easily become a comfort read, as it captures the essence of rom-coms you’d want to revisit.👀

Favorite quote:

"A story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends, but because of the way it's written."🤍]]> 4.03 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2026/04/07
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves:
review:
The Wedding People felt like a 2000s rom-coms📺. This book makes you feel giddy, flustered, giggly, and sad all at once.
author's description to the beautiful scenaries, roads ans hotel is wonderfully real. characters are so well written that each of them stands out. There isn’t a single character who feels unlikable, and the writer gives us small windows into their lives, allowing us to understand them. Phoebe's depression, hopelessness, grief was so authentically beautiful and messy. her loss and her fight with it was as raw as possible.
And man! the chemistry between Phoebe and Gary was burning off the pages. you could feel the tension, the spark!💥
It could easily become a comfort read, as it captures the essence of rom-coms you’d want to revisit.👀

Favorite quote:

"A story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends, but because of the way it's written."🤍
]]> The Lion Women of Tehran 199798217
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.”

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. As Ellie enjoys her new popularity at the best girls’ high school in Iran, her memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, Homa's sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.

Written with Marjan Kamali's signature prose, The Lion Women of Tehran is a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young, and the way love and courage transform our lives.]]> 336 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Malaha 5 4.44 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Kahaf (The Cave) 218440405 639 Rabia Khan Malaha 0 did-not-finish 3.87 Kahaf (The Cave)
author: Rabia Khan
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/07
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 24 Akbar Road 12078554
This book tracks the story of the contemporary Congress – its key characters, its ideology, its failure and its success in the years after the Emergency. Using the Congress seat of power at 24 Akbar Road as his vantage, author Rasheed Kidwai draws a compelling account of the rule – both backseat and forefront – of the various Congress leaders, from Indira Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi, who have helped steer its course.]]> 295 Rasheed Kidwai 9350090775 Malaha 0 to-read 3.33 2011 24 Akbar Road
author: Rasheed Kidwai
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Bastard of Istanbul 98920
In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbul is a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction.]]> 368 Elif Shafak 0670038342 Malaha 2 3.88 2006 The Bastard of Istanbul
author: Elif Shafak
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2026/03/30
date added: 2026/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 75555793 *The Sunday Times and Global number one bestseller*
*Winner of Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards*
*A Book of the Year in The Times, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Financial Times*

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the times they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?]]> 337 Sally Rooney 0571365442 Malaha 5 3.49 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2026/03/30
date added: 2026/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Last Summer in the City 54785501 Last Summer in the City is a witty and despairing classic of Italian literature. Biting, tragic, and endlessly quotable, this translated edition features an introductory appreciation from longtime fan New York Times bestselling author André Aciman.

In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between run-down hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At thirty, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich—but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever. Rather than toil and spin, isn’t it better to submit to the alienation of the Eternal City, Rome, sometimes a cruel and indifferent mistress, sometimes sweet and sublime? There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her.

First discovered by Natalia Ginzburg, Last Summer in the City is a forgotten classic of Italian literature, a great novel of a stature similar to that of The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. Gianfranco Calligarich’s enduring masterpiece has drawn comparisons to such writers as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Jonathan Franzen and is here made available in English for the first time.]]> 192 Gianfranco Calligarich 0374600155 Malaha 0 to-read 3.61 1970 Last Summer in the City
author: Gianfranco Calligarich
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/30
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 332 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Malaha 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/30
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]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever…

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Malaha 0 to-read 3.71 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/30
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]]> Flights 36885304 Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Here I am --
World in your head --
Your head in the world --
Syndrome --
Cabinet of curiosities --
Seeing is knowing --
Seven years of trips --
Guidance from Cioran --
Kunicki: water (I) --
Benedictus, quivenit]]> 416 Olga Tokarczuk 0525534199 Malaha 0 to-read 3.73 2007 Flights
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/25
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]]> August Blue 62039277 The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living.

At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson―former child prodigy, now in her thirties―walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.

Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.

So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.]]> 208 Deborah Levy Malaha 0 to-read 3.61 2023 August Blue
author: Deborah Levy
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Grief Is the Thing with Feathers]]> 25334576
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.

In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.]]> 114 Max Porter 0571323766 Malaha 0 to-read 3.82 2015 Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
author: Max Porter
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI]]> 204927599 From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.]]> 528 Yuval Noah Harari 059373422X Malaha 0 to-read 4.12 2024 Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams]]> 46074 Limbo is a thought-provoking treatise on the lasting consequences of class mobility in America. Drawing on his own story as well as on dozens more from individuals who share his experience, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano sheds light on the predicament of some 13 million Americans: reconciling their blue-collar upbringing with the white-collar world they now inhabit.

The profiles here show a remarkable consistency of emotion and experience across a diverse demographic that crosses all boundaries of sex, race, and religion. Opening a long-awaited dialogue, Limbo reflects the reality of a unique class struggling with an all-American brand of cultural isolation. There is something for everyone in these honest and eloquent stories of life in our modern meritocracy.

]]> 256 Alfred Lubrano 0471714399 Malaha 0 to-read 4.12 2003 Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
author: Alfred Lubrano
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/03
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143
Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 Malaha 0 to-read 4.07 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds]]> 78534 The uncanny frailty of human bonds, the feeling of insecurity that frailty inspires, and the conflicting desires to tighten the bonds yet keep them loose, are the principal themes of this important new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology and in the social sciences and humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the changing nature of human relationships.]]> 176 Zygmunt Bauman 0745624898 Malaha 0 to-read 3.89 2003 Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
author: Zygmunt Bauman
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/02
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]]> Arabesques 244377 264 Anton Shammas 0520228324 Malaha 0 to-read 3.78 1986 Arabesques
author: Anton Shammas
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/31
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]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Malaha 0 to-read 4.13 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/17
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]]> <![CDATA[A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4)]]> 248665 166 Anaïs Nin 0671871390 Malaha 0 to-read 3.76 1954 A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4)
author: Anaïs Nin
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/17
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]]> Near to the Wild Heart 153425 Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.

Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.]]> 192 Clarice Lispector 0811211401 Malaha 0 to-read 4.06 1943 Near to the Wild Heart
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/17
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]]> The Passion According to G.H. 153426 173 Clarice Lispector 0816617120 Malaha 0 to-read 4.16 1964 The Passion According to G.H.
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/17
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]]> The Hour of the Star 762390 The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.]]> 96 Clarice Lispector 0811211908 Malaha 0 to-read 4.10 1977 The Hour of the Star
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tattooist of Auschwitz (The Tattooist of Auschwitz, #1)]]> 38359036 Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.

Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.

One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.

A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions.]]> 272 Heather Morris 006287067X Malaha 0 to-read 4.32 2018 The Tattooist of Auschwitz (The Tattooist of Auschwitz, #1)
author: Heather Morris
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/16
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]]> Lonely People Meet 243132012
But when a cryptic organization arrives at his door and reveals Devaki is not who she seems, Karno's life is shattered. To find the truth, he must navigate a shadowy world where people rent fabricated lives and pasts can be rewritten.

Lonely People Meet is a haunting and elegant debut about the choices we make for love, and what happens when the lines between real feelings and borrowed memories begin to blur. It asks a simple, brutal what if you could have the perfect love only to realize it's nearly not real?]]> 218 Sayantan Ghosh 9369523634 Malaha 0 to-read 3.67 Lonely People Meet
author: Sayantan Ghosh
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/11/21
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]]> The Secret Book Society 222850723 A captivating new historical novel from Madeline Martin, set in Victorian London about a forbidden book club, dangerous secrets, and the women who dare to break free.
 
You are cordially invited to the Secret Book Society…
 
London, 1895: Trapped by oppressive marriages and societal expectations, three women receive a mysterious invitation to an afternoon tea at the home of the reclusive Lady Duxbury. Beneath the genteel facade of the gathering lies a secret book club—a sanctuary where they can discover freedom, sisterhood, and the courage to rewrite their stories.
 
Eleanor Clarke, a devoted mother suffocating under the tyranny of her husband. Rose Wharton, a transplanted American dollar princess struggling to fit the mold of an aristocratic wife. Lavinia Cavendish, an artistic young woman haunted by a dangerous family secret. All are drawn to the enigmatic Lady Duxbury, a thrice-widowed countess whose husbands’ untimely deaths have sparked whispers of murder.
 
As the women form deep, heartwarming friendships, they uncover secrets about their marriages, their pasts, and the risks they face. Their courage is their only weapon in the oppressive world that has kept them silent, but when secrets are deadly, one misstep could cost them everything.
 ]]> 336 Madeline Martin 1335016287 Malaha 0 to-read 3.98 2025 The Secret Book Society
author: Madeline Martin
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization]]> 6006458 The remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy—and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West.

For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand.

Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.]]> 272 Jonathan Lyons 1596914599 Malaha 0 to-read 3.89 2008 The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
author: Jonathan Lyons
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/18
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]]> गुनाहों का देवता 3282557 257 Dharamvir Bharati 8126317779 Malaha 0 to-read 4.34 1949 गुनाहों का देवता
author: Dharamvir Bharati
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Urdu Novel: Mohabbat Subha Ka Sitara Hai by Umera Ahmed]]> 20594839
Life has a way of acting as a spectator and throwing all kinds of surprises our way, just to see how we flounder. Widowed after few short months of marriage, Romaisa soon realizes how her life before Nabeel wasn’t half as bad. Humiliated, insulted, rejected and tortured, Romaisa passively endures, keeping her little daughter as her connection to sanity. And then the moment it seems the bleak night will last forever, the sun bursts in, full of glory and magnificence.
The horse-ridden carriage had turned back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, but the Prince has sent troops with the glass slipper to look for his lost Cinderella. Will the shoe fit Romaisa again?]]> Umera Ahmed Malaha 5 3.69 1998 Urdu Novel: Mohabbat Subha Ka Sitara Hai by Umera Ahmed
author: Umera Ahmed
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/09/11
date added: 2025/09/11
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]]> شہر ذات (Shehr-e-Zaat) 19369679 Shehr-e-Zaat is the exploration of the soul. This is the story of a journey that you set on when the realities of your world stop making sense. With her world turned upside down, Falak Sher Afgan, the hauntingly beautiful and rich daughter of a business tycoon finds herself shattered, wretched and humiliated. Damaged beyond repair and unable to face the ugly truths of her life, she finds herself on a desperate quest to find ALLAH, the one thing she has never bothered with in her life, and the only thing that eludes her now, or does it? Do you really have to reach to ALLAH through other human beings, or is it a mere ruse by HIM to make you kind towards others, and in reality HE actually lives in all of us? You just have to read this story to find out. There are no clichés, just a humbling tale of a girl who had it all, but had it all wrong. Don’t we all?]]> Umera Ahmed Malaha 5 3.96 1999 شہر ذات (Shehr-e-Zaat)
author: Umera Ahmed
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2025/09/11
date added: 2025/09/11
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]]> Dopehri 48743970 110 Pankaj Kapur 9353570972 Malaha 0 to-read 3.94 Dopehri
author: Pankaj Kapur
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> Mr Salary 34234631 My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.

Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.

Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.]]> 33 Sally Rooney 0571351956 Malaha 0 to-read 3.72 2016 Mr Salary
author: Sally Rooney
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/01
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]]> दीवार में एक खिड़की रहती थी 13451113 170 Vinod Kumar Shukla Malaha 0 to-read 4.32 1997 दीवार में एक खिड़की रहती थी
author: Vinod Kumar Shukla
name: Malaha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/22
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]]> Azazeel 222442512 Rabia Khan 9696024533 Malaha 0 3.99 Azazeel
author: Rabia Khan
name: Malaha
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/26
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]]>