A beautifully rendered portrait of love, healing, and long-buried pain, digging deep into the nature of trauma and class division. Perfect for readers of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.
THE IDLE STANCE OF THE TIPPLER PIGEON
by Safinah Danish Elahi
Neem Tree Press, May 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)
Zohaib, Misha and Nadia believed they would be in each other’s lives forever. As children they played, argued, teased and loved one another. Yet nothing could have prepared them for the tragic turn of events one fateful afternoon in Karachi, Pakistan, when the divisions and differences between them are revealed.
Years later and they are still trying to piece their lives back together, still trying to make sense of what happened. Zohaib is living in London, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Nadia has escaped the household where she first met Misha and Zohaib but finds fate delivering her back to their door…
Safinah Danish Elahi is a lawyer, writer and poet. She is the author of two books, The Unbridled Romance of Love and Pain and Eye on the Prize, a novel which is being adapted for tv. Safinah is also the founder of Reverie Publishers, an independent press based in Pakistan. Recently, she was selected for the Iowa Writing Program Fall Residency 2022.
Offering an accessible and balanced analysis, WHY WE PLAY explores how video games have permeated our daily lives. Their presence in our homes, culture, business, politics, sport, education, and healthcare has made them one of the most ubiquitous mediums of modern times. The role games play today – from influencing youth culture to informing the design of space craft –renders them remarkably powerful. But as games occupy an increasingly important place in our daily lives, it’s becoming harder to understand the opportunities they offer and the challenges they present.
After his sudden rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most dramatic period of British history in almost a century. From the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August 2019 to the Conservative party’s historic landslide victory later that year, the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Afghanistan crisis, the conflict in Ukraine, and the series of devastating scandals that were ultimately Johnson’s undoing, his premiership has been more explosive than any other in living memory.
2017. West Londoner and comic Ayesha is just about finding her feet on the stand-up scene – but it’s hard when stuffy venues only let one minority act on the bill. Then, after her vocal reaction to a sexist heckler goes viral, she suddenly finds herself in the spotlight and welcomed into a group of seasoned activists, all committed to the fight against sexism and the patriarchy. Ayesha is funny, can write the scripts, get people to listen, but she doesn’t have the connections of these powerful women – especially veteran activist Frankie and performance artist India Baxter-Wright – and she’s in awe of them.
Genderfluid Eamon Kastellakis wants to be beautiful. More than anything, he dreams of wearing couture dresses by the designers he worships, Alexander McQueen and Gucci, well away from the roar and threat of his alcoholic Greek da in their decaying house in Cork, Ireland.