On The Shelf

Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In BooksBy Azar NafisiFiction doesn8217;t just heal, it helps us cope with life8217;s pleasures and tra...

Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books
By Azar Nafisi

Fiction doesn8217;t just heal, it helps us cope with life8217;s pleasures and travails, its unexpected surprises and inexplicable injustices 8212; both big and small. It was a theme Chinese writer Sijie Dai visited last year in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. And it8217;s a theme Iranian professor returns to in her memoir about life under the ayatollahs from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the mid-nineties, in Tehran she put together a reading group of women who8217;d had brushes with orthodoxy 8212; over things like not veiling themselves and reading novels. As they read together the old classics 8212; especially by Nabokov 8212; they found parallels with their own lives and environs.

Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
By Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino once said his life was better recorded in fiction, and thus with one excuse or another always shrugged off suggestions that it was time he penned a memoir. Some would say his life is best recorded in books like Invisible Cities, If on a Winter8217;s Night a Traveler and Six Memos for the Next Millennium. To that wonderful oeuvre is now added this collection of autobiographical writings.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded 8212; August 27, 1883
By Simon Winchester

Eyewitness accounts from the 1880s tell of a day when India8217;s landmass shook and the sky turned red. It was actually a day on which an estimated 10 per cent of the earth8217;s surface trembled, when volcanic explosions occurred on the island of Krakatoa, near the western tip of Java, leaving 35,000 dead. Critics have argued that Krakatoa has been unnecessarily mythified, that it was not even the biggest volcanic explosion in the 19th century. Even so, Winchester uses the volcanic milestone to tell a geographical and historical saga.

Flash Point
By Paul Adam

This is fiction at its most audacious. The Dalai Lama is dead. His reincarnation has been born, deep in Tibet. Now, there are people looking for the new-born baby boy. Flash Point is a pacy thriller with an original plot which grabs you from page one. Maggie Walsh, a gutsy camerawoman who has worked in almost every global hot-spot, decides that the real exclusive lies in Lhasa. She gets into the country, at a time when the western media has been asked to leave. As she gets entangled with monks from McLeodganj also searching for the reincarnation, she realises she is also up against a Chinese government determined to capture the baby.