Told through a series of precise, charged vignettes, CIRCA tells the story of Heera Sanyal, the daughter of Bengali immigrants, as she negotiates the complicated, strange proximity of love and grief and struggles with the divide between her parents’ and society’s expectations, and her own vision for the future.
CIRCA
by Devi S. Laskar
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2022
On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, are rebelliously teasing what fun can be had out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina. But no matter how much Heera defies her strict upbringing, from pickpocketing to vandalism, she’s always avoided any real danger—until Marie is killed in an accident in front of her and Marco. Then everything changes. Marco begins calling himself Crash and over the years to come, spends his days womanizing and burning through a string of jobs. Heera’s dream of college in New York is upended by a family illness. She soon finds herself trapped in a loveless arranged marriage to a wealthy man and in-laws who become fearful of the devastating force of community gossip.
Over the years, Heera and Crash’s paths cross and re-cross, on a journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals—all in the name of love. Heart-wrenching and wry, CIRCA is a story of a young woman torn between familial duty and her own survival. Laskar penetratingly explores within these pages what it means to have an identity fractured by different cultures; issues of emotional inheritance, belonging, grief, and romance; and the many ways that people can disappear, both from themselves and others. Heera’s journey, from North Carolina to New York, and from girlhood to womanhood, reveals the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the paths of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow. The novel is also compulsively readable; a true one-sitting read.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which was named a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year” and “A Book All Georgians Should Read” by The Georgia Center for the Book. The novel was the winner of the 2019–2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Fiction and the 2020 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. It was also short-listed for the Northern California Book Awards and long-listed for the 2019 Northern California Golden Poppy Book Award in Fiction and for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been hailed by Marie Claire as “devastatingly potent,” by Booklist as “sharply relevant and tragically timeless,” by Jean Kwok as “searing, powerful, and beautifully written,” and by Kiese Laymon as “narratively beautiful as it is brutal…Laskar has changed how we will all write about state-sanctioned terror in this nation,” to name just a few highlights of praise. She is an alumna of The OpEd Project and VONA.
WATER ALWAYS WINS makes clear that we need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with water. We must embrace the reality that we are an integral part of nature and need learn to live in harmony with these forces that we cannot conquer. This requires humility, not arrogance; collaboration, not aggressive control and setting a goal, which is to determine what water wants and figure out a how to make way for it, while protecting and securing our lives. The overarching theme is that such a mindset is essential in all our dealings with every aspect of nature, if we want our planet to survive. As Erica Gies so beautifully states, water is life, it “flexes with the rhythms of the earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance upon the land.”
This was the grim reality that Ann Burgess, then a doctoral graduate with a degree in psychiatric nursing, found when she decided to get involved in the study of rape and sexual assault, choosing a topic that few others saw as worth the trouble. But what she called the complete “absence of understanding” surrounding this urgent issue left her no choice. Fortunately, she connected with a medical sociologist, Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, with whom Ann created the first ever formalized study of rape from the victim’s perspective, and through countless interviews with rape survivors ultimately proved that rape is more about dominance and control than sex. The impact of this early work was groundbreaking. It led to the development of the first rape crisis centers, created new police standards, and resulted in an increase in rape trials with outcomes that favored the victim. It also captured the attention of the FBI Academy, leading Burgess to become one of the first female consultants hired by the agency.
DIARY OF A MAGPIE tells the story of Stella, a child of Ghanaian parents, born and raised in South West London. Stella is born into the chaos of domestic violence and struggles to make sense of the world around her. She touches wood so that bad things won’t happen to her or her family – until she learns a poem about Magpies, ‘one for sorrow…’ Stella excels academically and achieves professional fulfilment and success once she leaves home. However, she is unable to make evidence-based conclusions about events that unfold around her. Stella continues to rely on superstition to provide meaning to her life; to control the otherwise uncontrollable. She feels her greatest personal happiness when she falls in love but learns that magpies alone can’t protect her from heartbreak, and that the impact of her childhood is something she will have to face – one way or another. 
Despite being a trained midwife, Illiyin’s own birth experience was traumatic and led her to examine the effects of birth trauma more deeply. She has grown to appreciate the need for greater understanding of what took place during childbirth and why, in order to facilitate healing during the postnatal period. Using her own experience as a midwife and mother Illiyin plans to dispel myths and taboos around pregnancy and give women and birthing people the tools to manage and alleviate the effects of birth trauma. Illiyin will also be giving practical tips and exercises throughout the book to help readers understand and manage any birth related trauma while transitioning into postnatal life – whether it is the first or fifth baby.