BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EASTER BREAK

I should have been ready to post this few days back so everyone can check it out before the Easter break but hey… better late than never.

Seems like time is not my friend and between a toddler, housework, work, my mummy blog, working out and reading I get lost somehow and don’t quite deliver in time. So, few days later, here I am offering some book recommendations for Easter Break, coming from the Penguin publishing house this time.

THE PARISIAN by Isabella Hammad –

A sublime reading experience: delicate, restrained, surpassingly intelligent, uncommonly poised and truly beautiful’ Zadie Smith

As the First World War shatters families, destroys friendships and kills lovers, a young Palestinian dreamer sets out to find himself.

Midhat Kamal navigates his way across a fractured world, from the shifting politics of the Middle East to the dinner tables of Montpellier and a newly tumultuous Paris. He discovers that everything is fragile: love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong.

Isabella Hammad delicately untangles the politics and personal tragedies of a turbulent era – the Palestinian struggle for independence, the strife of the early twentieth century and the looming shadow of the Second World War. An intensely human story amidst a global conflict, The Parisian is historical fiction with a remarkable contemporary voice.

THE LIBRARIAN OF AUSCHWITZ by Antonio Iturbe –

For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Choice: this is the story of the smallest library in the world – and the most dangerous.

‘It wasn’t an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less sombre times, when words rang out more loudly than machine guns…’

Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious books the prisoners have managed to smuggle past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the secret librarian of Auschwitz, responsible for the safekeeping of the small collection of titles, as well as the ‘living books’ – prisoners of Auschwitz who know certain books so well, they too can be ‘borrowed’ to educate the children in the camp.

But books are extremely dangerous. They make people think. And nowhere are they more dangerous than in Block 31 of Auschwitz, the children’s block, where the slightest transgression can result in execution, no matter how young the transgressor…

UNDERLAND by Robert McFarlane – From the high peaks of Mountains of the Mind to the lost paths of The Old Ways and the vanishing lexicon of The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane has traced the way our landscape is fused with language, storytelling and imagination. Ten years in the making, Underland is his enthralling record of journeys deep into the worlds beneath our feet. From the burial grounds of the Mendip Hills to the hidden catacombs of Paris, and further, to the deep blue, ancient ice of Greenland, Macfarlane explores – through myth, memory and experience – our most feared and venerated spaces of loss, discovery and deep time. Written with lyricism, power and prescience, Underland brings together the ancient and the urgent in a revelatory examination of an unseen and essential netherworld.

The highly anticipated new book from the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways.

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the sometimes vast and hidden worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future.

Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane’s long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.

AIRHEAD by Emily Maitlis –

The things that are said on camera are only part of the story.

Behind every interview there is a backstory. How it came about. How it ended. The compromises that were made. The regrets, the rows, the deeply inappropriate comedy.

Making news is an essential but imperfect art, and it rarely goes according to plan.

I never expected to find myself wandering around the Maharani of Jaipur’s bedroom with Bill Clinton or invited to the Miss USA beauty pageant by its owner, Donald Trump. I never expected to be thrown into a provincial Cuban jail, or to be drinking red wine at Steve Bannon’s kitchen table or spend three hours in a lift with Alan Partridge.

I certainly didn’t expect the Dalai Lama to tell me the story of his most memorable poo.

The beauty of television is its ability to simplify, but that’s also its weakness: it can distil everything down to one snapshot, one soundbite. Then the news cycle moves on.

Airhead is my step back from the white noise. Before and after the camera started rolling, this is what really happened.

All books can be found in Book Stores and also are available to order online.