Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

At the age of 23, Ayesha removed her face veil to begin her studies in New York City. Braiding together Western, South-Asian and Qur’anic storytelling styles, the author illuminates what it means to exist in a world that demands something different from each of her identities. With lyrical prose and scholarly precision, she weaves her personal experiences with incisive social commentary to uncover the meaning of faith and belonging, love and betrayal, family and womanhood. In so doing, she offers us a vision of freedom that isn’t measured in fabric.

This memoir tells the story of Dr. Joseph Sebarenzi, whose parents, seven siblings, and countless other family members were among 800,000 Tutsi brutally murdered over the course of 90 days in 1994 by extremist Rwandan Hutu - an efficiency that exceeded even that of the Nazi Holocaust. Outbreaks of ethnic violence had been occurring in Rwanda since colonial times when the Belgians ruled the region. As a child, Sebarenzi twice hid with his mother during episodes of killing, narrowly escaping with his life.

Schadenfreude is the story of a teenage Jewish intellectual who falls in love - in love with a boy (who breaks her heart), a language (that's nearly impossible to master), a culture (that's nihilistic but punctual), and a landscape (that's breathtaking when there's not a wall in the way). Rebecca is an everyday, misunderstood '90s teenager with a passion for Pearl Jam and Ethan Hawke circa Reality Bites until two men walk into her high school civics class: Dylan Gellner and Franz Kafka, hitching a ride in Dylan's backpack.

An inspiring story of a modern American icon, here is the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago.

Confessions of a Token Black Girl is a snappy comedic tale framing Danielle's first-hand experiences in Wisconsin and other places as the perpetual "token Black girl", fraught with dark moments and hate crimes. It's a coming-of-age-story but instead of finding herself during a road trip, Danielle found herself through the effects of racism. This book humorously chronicles Danielle's quest for understanding what Black identity means to her - instead of what it means to everyone else.

When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so embedded in the culture as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served eight presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Forest Whitaker narrates the story of this remarkable man who, while serving tea and supervising buffets, was also a witness to history.

All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who "took the road less clothed". Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.'s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relationship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters....

Rory and Ita, Roddy Doyle's first nonfiction book, tells, largely in their own words, the story of his parents' lives from their first memories to the present. Born in 1923 and 1925 respectively, they met at a New Year's Eve dance in 1947 and married in 1951. They remember every detail of their Dublin childhoods, the people, the politics, idyllic times in the Wexford countryside for Ita, for Rory, his apprenticeship as a printer.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.

Acharya Vinoba Bhave believed that for human welfare it is necessary that there should be social justice and economic equality. Keeping this objective in mind, after the country got independence in 1951, he started Bhoodan-Yagya Satyagraha. The basic principle of the Bhoodan movement was that all the sons of the earth have equal rights towards Mother Earth. Therefore, it is necessary that all the land in the country be redistributed in a fair manner.

As an infant, Julian Brave NoiseCat's father was found abandoned in a dumpster. Against all odds, he survived and made it out of his impoverished reservation only to abandon his own son. As a young man, NoiseCat embarks on an unforgettable journey into his family's past and his people's present. NoiseCat grapples with the erasure of North America's First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, and illuminates the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental and political movements that are reshaping the future.

Aged twenty-one, fuelled by a love of K-dramas and a need to find herself, Alice Amelia moved to Seoul. She knew no one in her adopted country, didn't speak the language, and hadn't tried kimchi, let alone grilled cow intestines or Korean corn dogs. Determined to follow her dream, Alice becomes everything she wasn't in England: adding spicy gochujang sauce to every meal, dancing in K-pop videos, dating hot Korean models, and even injecting salmon sperm into her eye bags.

Welts on Your Butt a Calf Could Suck brings small-town stories to life from the gravel roads and hog lots of northwest Missouri—where dinner came at noon, supper came at sundown, 4-H wasn’t just an after-school activity, and life’s best lessons were often learned the hard way (sometimes barefoot).

Shocking, but laced with wry humour, Vladimir Pereverzin’s extraordinary story is of an ordinary man whose comfortable life is upended. Refusing to give false testimony against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he is plunged into lengthy, brutal incarceration in Russia’s nightmarish prisons and penal colonies, including some in which political prisoner Alexei Navalny has been held.

When Aamna Mohdin travelled to Calais to report on the refugee crisis, she was confronted by a reality she had been outrunning for two decades: that she had been a child refugee herself. Determined to piece her scattered family history together, Mohdin set off on a mission. Her journey would see her cross the world: from the rooftops of Mogadishu to a reunion with a long-lost friend in Amsterdam to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Scattered is a powerful investigation into the aftershocks of displacement, written by a young woman uniquely placed to explore the refugee experience.

When it comes to Skinheads, I see a lot of people these days re-writing history, whitewashing the youth cult or bending the truth to suit their political narrative. I spent over ten years of my young life as a London Bootboy and became one of the most famous Skinheads in the world. Being a Skinhead had a profound effect on me. Even though I walked away from that life, and left it in the last century, I still feel the shockwaves of my experience and still find people with nefarious agendas trying to tell their version of my story.

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In this book, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level.

On August 4, 1972, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of over 80,000 Ugandan Asians from the country. A brave few stayed, but most left to Asia or Europe. Stripped of everything, my family chose to start over in Britain. Our story is just one of tens of thousands. I lived history. Though others may tell it differently, this is my experience. My family and I built ourselves from the ground up, standing strong against an endless wave of racism that sought to keep us in our place. To be able to simply walk down the street in peace once seemed impossible.

Malorie Blackman OBE is one of Britain's best loved and most widely read writers, and this is her long-awaited autobiography. For more than 30 years, her books have helped to shape British culture and inspired generations of younger readers and writers. The Noughts and Crosses series, started in 2000, sparked a new and necessary conversation about race and identity in the UK and are already undisputed classics of 21st-century children's literature.

Faleeha Hassan became intimately acquainted with loss and fear while growing up in Najaf, Iraq. Now, in a deeply personal account of her life, she remembers those she has loved and lost.