 | The Hindu On BooksTuesday | 17 March, 2026 |  |
| The Hindu On Books newsletter aims to take you deeper into the world of literature every week. Written and curated by Radhika Santhanam, this newsletter comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. |
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 Photo for representation. | Photo Credit: R. Ravindran Books against resistanceThe Hindu on Books(This story is part of The Hindu on Books newsletter that comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.) Dear reader, In 1979, the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan to prop up a communist regime. It failed miserably. Later, the U.S. sent its troops to Afghanistan as part of its ‘war against terror’, with the aim of overthrowing the Taliban. Nearly 20 years later, after trillions of dollars were spent and countless lives lost, the U.S. gave up. It withdrew clumsily, plunging the nation in chaos. A vindicated Taliban returned to power. And Afghanistan is arguably much the same. History has shown time and again that toppling a regime may be easy simply because it requires brute force, but building a nation is much harder. This is what Saleem Rashid Shah argues in this piece. He says, “The turmoil in Iran may be shaped by the geopolitical designs of powerful states, but no durable change can be engineered from outside.” In his essay, Shah refers to three books to trace the history of Iran until this juncture. Ryszard Kapuściński’s Shah of Shahs is about the last days of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, before the 1979 Iranian revolution. But that pivotal moment in Iran’s history did not bring the joy that the people anticipated; instead the values it propagated quickly decayed, argues Arash Azizi in What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom. Four decades later, protesters, many of them women, accused the Islamic regime of the same authoritarianism and repression found during the Shah’s time. Journalists who reported on the women’s movement faced imprisonment and even death, but they brought to the fore the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Iran. This is what Fatemah Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy write about in For The Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising. Books of the weekIn her book, On Earth As It Is Beneath, longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Ana Paula Maia presents a haunting vision of human violence. On the site of a former ground where slaves were formally tortured, the state builds a penal colony meant to reform prisoners but ultimately only traps them. As the prison nears closure, a ritual begins: on full-moon nights, inmates are released and hunted by the warden. “The boundary between man and beast melts,” writes Vasudevan Mukunth in this review. What makes this novel particularly interesting is that it “entirely populated by men... yet, the architects of this narrative are women.” Mirza Waheed’s latest novel, Maryam & Son, is set in London. Maryam wakes up one fine morning to find that her son, Dilawar Ali, has disappeared. She lodges a missing person report with the police, who later inform her that he is likely to be in Iraq, having joined the Islamic State. “She, a British-Indian Muslim whose faith and identity become a part of the investigation, is neither accused nor absolved but made to inhabit the space of guilt by association,” writes Attaul Munim Zahid in his review. SpotlightAbstract woman face collage in modern vector art design. Feminine abstraction poster in colorful pallette. Creative geometric female pattern in cubism style. | Photo Credit: GrafVishenkaAs the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, I felt two books deserved to be in the spotlight. The first is A Woman of No Consequence by Kalpana Karunakaran. Many women believe that their lives are ordinary; that they are of “no consequence.” Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother, Pankajam, who was largely confined to the home, felt the same — that she was a “humble housewife tied to mundane work”. Yet her prolific writing reveals a far richer life. “Karunakaran writes a family history — a feminist treatise centring around three generations of women in her family,” writes Ramya Kannan in her review. “Hemmed in by Brahmin orthodoxy, there is still a free spirit that rests in the women and makes them, for us, the readers, women of great consequence, inspirational, and worthy of emulation.” The second is The Other Half of the Coconut, edited by K. Srilata. In today’s Tamil Nadu, most debates around the Self-Respect Movement centre around the influential leader, Periyar E.V. Ramasamy. This book presents a women’s history of the movement, highlighting their struggles against both caste and patriarchy. It equally gives us a glimpse into the lives of devadasis through translated excerpts of The Dasis’ Wicked Snares, a 1936 classical work by Moovalur A. Ramamrithammal. Read the review here. NightstandNEW DELHI 12/08/2015: A customer reading book at the Fact & Fiction Book Store at Vasant Vihar . August 12, 2015. Photo: Pranay Gupta | Photo Credit:I have by my bedside Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, a brainteaser that is a huge hit in Japan. With three interconnected mysteries and plenty of drawings, it is a great deal of fun, much like a puzzle you sit with on a lazy Sunday morning. Uketsu’s new book, Strange Buildings, is my next read and I cannot wait for it. Reading mattersWhat’s making news? Recently, the HT Parekh Foundation, a Mumbai-based philanthropic foundation, hosted its inaugural Harsha Parekh Librarian Awards, to celebrate individuals and organisations nurturing a lifelong love for reading among children. The awards drew 275 nominations from across India. It comprised 153 school librarians, 52 community librarians, and 70 organisations across 16 States. Jai Shekhar, a teacher-cum-librarian at the government primary school Dharmapur - Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh, won the school librarian award; Saba Khan, founder of the Savitribai Phule Fatima Sheikh Library, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, won the community librarian award; and the Organisation for Early Literacy Promotion, founded in 2008 to build school and community libraries in rural India, won the Organisation Championing Library Work award. Ziaa Lalkaka, Executive Director and CEO of HT Parekh Foundation, said the awards were a recognition of “quiet changemakers”. Do write to me with suggestions, comments, and feedback to radhika.s@thehindu.co.in. Have a happy reading week! |
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