Book picks similar to
This Side of Innocence by Rashid Al-Daif
countries
lit-shelf
middle-eastern
abandoned
Driving by Starlight
Anat Deracine - 2018
They delight in small rebellions against the Saudi cultural police—secret Western clothing, forbidden music, flirtations. But Leena wants college, independence—she wants a different life. Though her story is specific to her world (a world where it's illegal for women to drive, where a ten-year-old boy is the natural choice as guardian of a fatherless woman), ultimately it's a story about friendship, family, and freedom that transcends cultural differences.Author's Note: When I wrote this book, I was reflecting on the Saudi Arabia that I had lived in and left several years ago. It is also a work of fiction, and so much of it rests on my imperfect memory, anecdotes of others and research. Some plot events, such as the ones described at KAUST, are inventions and not historically accurate. I am really glad to say that Saudi Arabia is not what it was ten or even five years ago, and this book does not accurately reflect the experiences of women there today.
In the Eye of the Sun
Ahdaf Soueif - 1993
Here, a woman who grows up among the Egyptian elite, marries a Westernized husband, and, while pursuing graduate study, becomes embroiled in a love affair with an uncouth Englishman.
The Essential Rumi
Rumi
This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems.Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of readers, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of thirteenth-century Sufi Mystic Rumi more popular than ever.The Essential Rumi continues to be the bestselling of all Rumi books, and the definitive selection of his beautiful, mystical poetry.
The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners: A 7-Day Plan to Beat Bloat and Soothe Your Gut with Recipes for Fast IBS Relief
Mollie Tunitsky - 2017
Link, MSW, RD, LD, Registered Dietitian, Certified Wellness Coach When you have IBS, planning your day around the whims of your stomach can be frustrating and even embarrassing. Just ask Mollie Tunitsky, whose own struggles with IBS led her to follow and find success with a low-FODMAP diet. Determined to share this achievement with others, Mollie lays out an easy to follow meal plan for fast relief from pain and bloating in The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners. Designed for anyone new to the low-FODMAP diet, The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners equips you with everything you need to settle your stomach in just seven days.The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners includes:
A 7-Day Low-FODMAP Meal Plan containing shopping lists, a symptom tracker, and helpful tips
Over 75 Low-FODMAP Friendly Recipes indicating dairy-free, one pot, quick prep, 30 minutes or less, vegetarian, or vegan dishes
A Low-FODMAP Introduction covering basic information about the FODMAP diet and how it affects your body
The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners includes recipes such as: Banana Pancakes, Vegetable Frittata, Grilled Bok Choy, Creamy Pumpkin Pasta, Vegetable Fried Rice, Baked Coconut Shrimp, Chicken Piccata, Classic Turkey Burgers, Flourless Chocolate Cake with Berry Sauce, and much more!Make plans and follow through with The Low-FODMAP Diet for Beginners meal plan.
The Gardens of Light
Amin Maalouf - 1991
His tolerant and humanist philosophy wanted to reconcile the religions of his time. It earned him persecution, torment and hatred...
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi
Rana Dasgupta - 2014
Since the economic liberalization of 1991, wealth has poured into India, and especially into Delhi. Capital bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India’s capital city, charting its emergence from a rural backwater to the center of the new Indian middle class. No other city on earth better embodies the breakneck, radically disruptive nature of the global economy’s growth over the past twenty years. India has not become a new America, though. It more closely resembles postSoviet Russia with its culture of tremendous excess and undercurrents of gangsterism. But more than anything else, India’s capital, Delhi, is an avatar for capitalism unbound. Capital is an intimate portrait of this very distinct place as well as a parable for where we are all headed. In the style of V. S. Naipaul’s now classic personal journeys, Dasgupta travels through Delhi to meet with extraordinary characters who mostly hail from what Indians call the new Indian middle class, but they are the elites, by any measure. We first meet Rakesh, a young man from a north Indian merchant family whose business has increased in value by billions of dollars in recent years. As Dasgupta interviews him by his mammoth glass home perched beside pools built for a Delhi sultan centuries before, the nightly party of the new Indian middle class begins. To return home, Dasgupta must cross the city, where crowds of Delhi’s workers, migrants from the countryside, sleep on pavements. The contrast is astonishing. In a series of extraordinary meetings that reveals the attitudes, lives, hopes, and dreams of this new class, Dasgupta meets with a fashion designer, a tech entrepreneur, a young CEO, a woman who has devoted her life to helping Delhi’s forgotten poor—and many others. Together they comprise a generation on the cusp, like that of fin-de-siècle Paris, and who they are says a tremendous amount about what the world will look like in the twenty-first century.
Confessions
Rabee Jaber (ربيع جابر) - 2016
After a brief and confused exchange, several rounds of bullets are fired into the car, killing everyone inside except for a small boy of four or five. The boy is taken to the hospital, adopted by one of the assassins, and raised in a new family. “My father used to kidnap and kill people …” begins this haunting tale of a child who was raised by the murderer of his real family. The narrator of Confessions doesn’t shy away from the horrible truth of his murderous father—instead he confronts his troubled upbringing and seeks to understand the distortions and complexities of his memories, his war-torn country, and the quiet war that rages inside of him.
Crescent
Diana Abu-Jaber - 2003
The reading guide includes a number of recipes to share with friends and family!An Arab-American novel as delicious as Like Water for Chocolate.Praised by critics from The New Yorker to USA Today for her first novel, Arabian Jazz ("an oracular tale that unfurls like gossamer"), Diana Abu-Jaber weaves with spellbinding magic a multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles. Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food—until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking. Falling in love brings Sirene's whole heart to a boil—stirring up memories of her parents and questions about her identity as an Arab American. Written in a lush, lyrical style reminiscent of The God of Small Things, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment.
The Boy Who Loved
Durjoy Datta - 2017
And that's how he wants things to seem - normal.Deep down, however, the guilt of letting his closest friend drown in the school's swimming pool gnaws at him. And even as he punishes himself by hiding from the world and shying away from love and friendship, he feels drawn to the fascinating Brahmi - a girl quite like him, yet so different. No matter how hard Radhu tries not to, he begins to care ...Then life throws him into the deep end and he has to face his worst fears.Will love be strong enough to pull him out?
The Boy Who Loved
, the first of a two-part romance, is warm and dark, edgy and quirky, wonderfully realistic and dangerously unreal.
The King in Exile
Sudha Shah - 2012
Exhaustively researched and gracefully written, The King in Exile tells a story of compelling human interest, filled with drama, pathos and tragedy... [It] heralds the arrival of a writer of non-fiction who is both uncommonly talented and exceptionally diligent... One of the great merits of [the book] is that it is completely free of jargon and theorizing. It is in essence a family story, centred on five women whose lives were waylaid by history' Amitav Ghosh in his blog 'The captivity of Burma's last king and the fall of the Konbaung dynasty: a compelling new account'. In 1879, as the king of Burma lay dying, one of his queens schemed for his forty-first son, Thibaw, to supersede his half brothers to the throne. For seven years, King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat ruled from the resplendent, intrigue-infused Golden Palace in Mandalay, where they were treated as demi-gods. After a war against Britain in 1885, their kingdom was lost, and the family exiled to the secluded town of Ratnagiri in British-occupied India. Here they lived, closely guarded, for over thirty-one years. The king's four daughters received almost no education, and their social interaction was restricted mainly to their staff. As the princesses grew, so did their hopes and frustrations. Two of them fell in love with 'highly inappropriate' men. In 1916, the heartbroken king died. Queen Supayalat and her daughters were permitted to return to Rangoon in 1919. In Burma, the old queen regained some of her feisty spirit as visitors came by daily to pay their respects. All the princesses, however, had to make numerous adjustments in a world they had no knowledge of. The impact of the deposition and exile echoed forever in each of their lives, as it did in the lives of their children. Written after years of meticulous research, and richly supplemented with photographs and illustrations, The King in Exile is an engrossing human-interest story of this forgotten but fascinating family.
First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood
Thrity Umrigar - 2003
Told with startling honesty, the memoir paints an unforgettable picture of middle-class life in contemporary Bombay.
The Most Uncommon Cold I: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Jeffrey Littorno - 2013
Her neck was still bent awkwardly to the left. I was struggling to make sense of what I was seeing when she spoke. “Wha…what…hap… happened t…to me?” She stuttered and slurred, but her words could be understood. Her eyes were still glassy as she slowly turned her head to look at me. I took me a few seconds to respond. Replying to someone who was just a moment earlier to all appearances dead has a way of taking your breath away. Eventually, I managed to say, “Well, I don’t really know, I...uh...came in and there was a man in...airport coveralls named James and...” “I f-feel cold,” she muttered slowly as if she had not heard me. Sluggishly and with difficulty, she raised herself at the waist. She looked down at her bloody body surveying the damage. Until this point, I had not noticed that her right shoulder looked as if a bite had torn away a chunk of the flesh and her left cheek had four parallel deep scratches as if fingernails had ripped down the side of her face. I couldn’t see other wounds, but blood covered most of her light green uniform making it look black. “You shouldn’t move!” I yelled. “Don’t move! I’ll go find a doctor!” I was standing a few feet from her, but somehow she managed to twist around a reach my leg. I felt her hand grab hard into the skin of my calf. “No, s-s-stay here,” she hissed as I yanked my leg free and backed away. “You need a doctor!” I cried out as I spun around to leave. When I reached the doorway, I looked back at her. She was still struggling to stand even as she slid her body toward me. A trail of smeared blood stayed on the white tile floor behind her. “Stay,” she hissed again, but I was already out the door.Kevin Turner is having a very bad day. People around him aredying... but they are not staying dead. Even in a world that seems to have gone crazy, the reporter is determined make sense of it all. Now he just has to stay alive long enough to get the facts.
The Stones of Andarus
Tom Sechrist - 2012
When a demented Master Mage intends to unleash the unholy power of these ancient artifacts, it will fall to five unlikely heroes to stop him. The battle for the fate of the realm has only just begun...Legend has it that a demented sorcerer named Andarus sought to harness the power of creation…to bend it to his will. He searched throughout the realm for mystical vessels that could contain such unfathomable power and The Stones of Andarus were created. The Stones are said to contain a fragment of the power of creation along with the dark, twisted soul of the sorcerer Andarus.On this account, the legends are true.The fate of The Stones through history is not known. Some say that, despite their awesome power, they were destroyed long ago. Others claim they were divided and hidden away in the far corners of the land. Yet others believe the sinister power of the Stones has faded over the great span of time since their creation, and can never be a threat again. Then there are those who say the tale of the Stones is nothing but pure fantasy.On this account, the legends are dead wrong.Xavier, an unstable and evil Master Mage, has spent his life perfecting his mastery of not only the Mystical Arts, but the forbidden magic of the Dark Mystics. Now, at the peak of his sinister power, he has the Stones of Andarus and intends to not only unleash their unholy power, but attempt to control it.Such power, twisted by the crazed essence of a mad man, can never be controlled and dared not be unleashed, but Xavier believes he has the power and the skill to accomplish the impossible.Enter Daimion Devenshire, a mysterious loner with seductive charms, dark secrets and deep scars. He is a minor mage of the Mystical Arts, but there is a power within him that not even he is aware of...at least not yet. When he learns that Xavier has the Stones, he knows that the mad man has to be stopped or the entire realm could be forever altered if not destroyed. Joining him on his desperate quest are The Lady Brianna Standish, seductively beautiful and fiercely independent. She is a woman who lives her life on her terms, much to the chagrin of medieval society. Raven Darkseed is a rouge Adept Mage of the Mystical Arts and the closest thing to a best friend to Devenshire. Shantira Dubris is a young village woman set on vengeance and torn by the storm of emotions and sensations that Devenshrie stirs within her. Zandorth Krahl is a warrior of the Ancient Class, a vanishing breed of men who value honor and integrity above all else.From the beginning, Devenshire and company are pursued…by both friend and foe. Darius Thieberian, a vampire with special designs on Brianna, stalks the group with motives as dark as the night he lives in. Rachelle Tambrey, a unique vampire with an unexplainable interest in Devenshire, follows as well. Add a compliment of the King’s Royal Guards who have been convinced that Devenshire is a vampire by an ex-vampire hunter turned bandit, and the group’s efforts to save the realm are thwarted at every turn.Through trials and tribulations, deceptions and betrayals this group of unlikely heroes must face many obstacles in their epic quest to stop Xavier, including an opponent fiercer than any they have ever faced…the demons within themselves.The battle for the fate of the realm has only just begun...
Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz - 1956
A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.
Kitchen Confidence: Essential Recipes and Tips That Will Help You Cook Anything
Kelsey Nixon - 2014
Her recipes, which are broken down into simple steps, teach readers how to cook, highlighting key tools and basic techniques everyone should know. And yet her flavors are anything but basic; Kelsey gives everyone the confidence to start with the 2.0 version of a recipe instead of the boring standards. For example, she makes her house pilaf with quinoa instead of rice, and her addictive fruit salad is a savory first course instead of a lackluster dessert. With 100 recipes and 60 color photographs, Kitchen Confidence brings home all of the energy and spirit of the Cooking Channel show of the same name, making it an excellent handbook for newlyweds, recent college graduates, and those discovering their kitchens for the first time.