Books like Lajja (Shame) by T. Nasrin

The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, exploring the lives of black women in the South and their experiences of abuse and struggle for independence.

Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic follows Okonkwo, an Igbo wrestling champion, as he navigates pre‑colonial traditions and the disruptive arrival of European missionaries in Nigeria’s southeastern region.

The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. The book also reflects its irony against casteism, which is a major discrimination that prevails in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.

From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a classic Harlem Renaissance novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows Janie Crawford as she recounts the story of her life as she journeys from a naive teenager to a woman in control of her destiny.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a classic Harlem Renaissance novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows Janie Crawford as she recounts the story of her life as she journeys from a naive teenager to a woman in control of her destiny.

A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's critically acclaimed second novel, set in India in the mid-1970s and focusing on four unlikely individuals who come together in a city apartment during a state of emergency.

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.

Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.

Living on an island where all faiths coexist peacefully, precocious teen Peter and his siblings are shocked when their devout vicar father and eccentric artisan mother go missing at the height of an effort to boost church attendance.

The animosity and bloodletting between Muslim and Hindu extremists on the Indian subcontinent are centuries old. But when the 450-year-old Babri mosque in Ayodhya (southeast of Delhi) was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992, it let loose a worldwide wave of Muslim reprisals against all Hindus - a reign of terror that extended even to Bangladesh's small Hindu community. These incidents form the background to Taslima Nasrin's explosive and courageous novel, Shame (Lajja in Bengali), describing the nightmarish fate of one family. Not since Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses has a book provoked such mob violence, public outcries, and calls for the author's death. Following the initial appearance of Shame in Bangladesh, Dr. Nasrin was physically attacked and made the object of hate campaigns. Her book so angered Muslim leaders that they placed her under a fatwa, or holy judgment, offering thousands of dollars to anyone who would kill her. Dr. Nasrin went into hiding until, with the aid of American and European Union authorities, she was offered asylum in Sweden, where she currently lives. The fatwa, however, remains in effect. The novel's title, Lajja, bespeaks the author's shame at human degradation, her shame both for a government which could not protect the Hindu minority, and for her fellow citizens. It is the indictment of a nation - indeed, an entire religion. Dr. Nasrin calls Shame the "testament" of a writer determined, despite the danger she faces, to speak out in favor of Islamic reform, religious tolerance, and freedom of expression, and against Muslim extremism and other forms of fanaticism.