Books Archive

An Idle Woman

By Wendy Parkins

April 2, 2026

1838, England: When eighteen-year-old Frances Dickinson impulsively marries Lieutenant John Geils, all her hopes for her future are quickly shattered as she finds there is much about her husband she did not know. A cruel and violent man, John keeps Frances in isolation on his family’s estate, while spending her fortune and preying upon their maids.

Frances yearns to break free from her marriage but the law is not on her side. Only when John’s abuse escalates can she set in motion a daring plan to secure her freedom.

A story of gaslighting, control and one woman’s fight, An Idle Woman is the true story behind one of the most sensational divorce trials of the nineteenth century.

Son of Nobody

By Yarnn Martel

April 2, 2026

Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.

In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.

As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.

Heart Lamp

By Banu Mushtaq

April 2, 2026

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters—the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost—that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.