![Lasting impressions Lasting impressions](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Interpreter_of_Maladies_feature.jpg)
Lasting impressions
I often panic when I am asked about my ‘favourite’ books, especially since publishing my own debut novel Hashim & Family earlier this year. It is such a personal question – there is so much to be understood about someone from learning about the books that they love – that it can almost feel like...
![The duty of disobedience The duty of disobedience](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Suffragette_Manifestos_feature.jpg)
The duty of disobedience
Twenty-five years after its inception, ten years since the last instalment in the series, and with over 4 million copies sold to date, Penguin Great Ideas is back with a brand new selection of 20 titles. Bringing to readers the works of the many great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas have shaken civilisation and helped...
![Author's lunch Author's lunch](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Readers_Room_feature.jpg)
Author’s lunch
Inviting an author to lunch is one of the publishing world’s great rituals. Authors receive an invitation four or five times a year. Since there are many authors in one publishing house, that means a lot of lunches. Editors feed their authors like fat misanthropic cats they’re hoping to butter up and make purr. The...
![To do or not to do To do or not to do](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Patrick_Freyne_feature.jpg)
To do or not to do
The Irish Times features writer, failed rock star and author of OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea reflects on some significant life, career and reading choices, names some of his literary, comedy and comic-book influences, and grapples with organising a writing regime and grasping an idea before it breaks free. Where are you now? In...
![A proposition A proposition](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Straight_from_the_Horses_Mouth_feature.jpg)
A proposition
That’s when she arrives. A skinny stick slides her head through the curtain and opens it with a fluid movement. A skinny stick with long disheveled hair at the end. Hamid told me she was the neighbor’s niece but I hadn’t imagined she would be so young. She’s standing in front of the door and...
![Spreading their wings Spreading their wings](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/she-will-soar-pb-feature.jpg)
Spreading their wings
I’d like to travel back through time and tell my schoolgirl self that, one day, I’d consider poetry to be a magic carpet. (Although, I suspect she would have looked up from wrestling with a knotty slice of D.H. Lawrence only to roll her eyes!) To me now, though, there is no more efficient escape...
![Ukamaka Olisakwe: Breaking free Ukamaka Olisakwe: Breaking free](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Ukamaka_feature.jpg)
Ukamaka Olisakwe: Breaking free
Ukamaka Olisakwe’s fierce, measured, ultimately hopeful novel Ogadinma, rightly dubbed “a feminist classic in the making”, is an unflinching portrait of female survival and inner strength in the face of multiple harrowing obstacles in modern-day Nigeria, where patriarchal rules and behaviours are ingrained but fought against daily by the nation’s women. The eponymous heroine is...
![Nicola Maye Goldberg: Room for doubt Nicola Maye Goldberg: Room for doubt](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Nicola_Maye_Goldberg_slider-290x290.jpg)
Nicola Maye Goldberg: Room for doubt
Nicola Maye Goldberg’s Nothing Can Hurt You is a literary thriller that revolves around the murder of a young female student by her boyfriend, but rather than investigate the crime, she deftly examines its repercussions on a broad spectrum of people, from those directly affected to a wider society habituated to violence against women. Sara...