![Anatomy of an obsession Anatomy of an obsession](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ursula-villarreal-moura-slider-290x290.jpg)
Anatomy of an obsession
You’re likely wondering what all this is about – my aim in contacting you. It’s been three years since rain flicked our glasses as we stood inches apart and I stared at your quivering upper lip, which always reminded me of the tilde: ~. Last week, a journalist contacted me. Since I appeared in a...
![Familiar things Familiar things](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/a-pebble-in-the-throat-feature-290x290.jpg)
Familiar things
Aasmah Mir’s candid and eloquent memoir A Pebble in the Throat tells of her childhood in 1970s Glasgow, and traces in parallel the story of her mother Almas’ own life as a young woman in Pakistan in the 1950s before uprooting to Scotland. A love letter to Scotland, to heritage and to family, it doesn’t...
![Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/nikhil-parmar-feature-1-290x290.jpg)
Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious
Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
![Close at hand and out of reach Close at hand and out of reach](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/if-i-survive-you-feature-290x290.jpg)
Close at hand and out of reach
Jonathan Escoffery’s debut novel is bold and beautiful. It’s told over seven interconnected stories and from different members of the same family. A Jamaican family come to the USA to find a better life for their sons Delano and Trelawny but things don’t work out as planned. When his parents split up Trelawny stays with...
![Tessa McWatt: A place in the world Tessa McWatt: A place in the world](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Tessa_McWatt_slider-290x290.jpg)
Tessa McWatt: A place in the world
Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line throws together four strangers at a wedding in the Indian Himalayan foothills. Twenty-five-year-old Reema is a classical singer born in India but raised as a Londoner, who has travelled without her Scottish boyfriend. Having recently discovered she is pregnant, she is facing a life-shifting decision about her future. Yosh is...
![Samira Sedira: The makings of a murder Samira Sedira: The makings of a murder](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Samira_Sedira_slider-290x290.jpg)
Samira Sedira: The makings of a murder
French-Algerian author and actress Samira Sedira’s People Like Them, her first novel to be translated into English, is a fictional retelling of a real-life multiple murder in a mountain village in Haute-Savoie, in which a recently arrived wealthy black property developer, his white wife and their three young children were brutally killed by a neighbour....
![My struggles with cultural appropriation My struggles with cultural appropriation](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Common_Ground_feature.jpg)
My struggles with cultural appropriation
My debut novel Common Ground tells the story of a friendship between two boys from very different backgrounds. Stan is a child of suburbia, struggling with bullies as the new scholarship kid at a private school. Charlie is Romany, and lives on the Traveller site on the outskirts of town. My aim for Common Ground was...
![Neema Shah: A place called home Neema Shah: A place called home](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Neema_slider-290x290.jpg)
Neema Shah: A place called home
If you’re non-white living in a majority white place or indeed a visible or identifiable ‘foreigner’ in a land, the chances are you will have at some point been told to “go back to your own country”. Especially in 1970s Britain. The people who regularly shouted this none-too-friendly command would most probably not stop and...
![Raven Leilani: In the air tonight Raven Leilani: In the air tonight](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Luster_cover_slider-290x290.jpg)
Raven Leilani: In the air tonight
Luster is an original, darkly funny debut about an interracial love triangle, by a new voice with the power to turn modern manners upside down and inside out. Edie is having online sex with Eric, a man she met on a dating app who messages her with impeccable punctuation – she has a good feeling...