In the state of seige that we are living in across the world, or, like myself, in an Italy emerging from the pandemic battlefield, a riveting book is our best means of being transported beyond our confined horizons.

After holding polls which closed on July 5, the Daily Star Book Club will be reading Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children starting Wednesday, July 15. Read-along rules, discussions, and a list of stores where the novel is available are all up on DS Books’ social media pages.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit the knowledge centres of capital Dhaka. Many bookshops are slowly shutting down and publishing houses are struggling to survive. Amidst this crisis, writers and booklovers are seeking state patronage to help them survive.

I came across Kristy’s Great Idea, the first book of Ann M Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club legacy, at 16, in my school’s library in Qatar.

There are two things that I believe are enough to make me lose my sanity during times of unrest—scrolling down my Facebook feed and the afternoon TV news. The characters in Megha Majumdar’s new novel, A Burning (2020), become unavoidably embroiled in both.

“Mamaa, mama re! Would you like to munch on my toast and have a sip from my sugary milk tea?”

The twentieth century’s interactions with the popular revolutions, capitalist advent, authoritarianism, World Wars, repressive state-system paves the way for a frowning skepticism about the Enlightenment metanarrative and nuances the global literary firmament with dystopian motif.

He’s mysterious. He’s charming. He’s strong, skilled and agile. He makes you think of James Bond, or perhaps Jason Bourne.

At the time of writing this article, the number of coronavirus cases in Bangladesh crept towards 140,000. This crises has brought forth an old conundrum: we rarely think of diseases as a part of ourselves,

On an unnamed island, the townspeople awaken to an unsettling feeling. Something has disappeared from their memories and dropped into a bottomless pit, joining perfume, hats, and birds, to name a few. From today, the townspeople are incapable of remembering anything about this ‘something’.

On offer is a remarkably candid biography of Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the powerful story-teller of the twentieth century; highlighted by her singly recognised classic novel, Rebecca (1938). At the time,

Looking for exceptional reading a month after the coronavirus pandemic set in, I took up the Portuguese writer José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, reckoning that a Nobel Prize winner’s work would be well worth spending time on in these quarantine days.

Dadman

Aaj O Agamikaal: Nirbachito Shakkhatkar (Daily Star Books, 2020) by Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury and edited by Emran Mahfuz, a young

Sudeep Chakravarti is an eminent commentator and author whose narrative non-fiction and fiction have been translated into Bangla, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, German and more. In January 2020, his book—Plassey:

Social media brimmed with photos and stories of dads for Father's Day this past Sunday, June 21. But who were some of the fathers we have loved reading in books? The DS Books team chimed in with their favourites.

Now that we are fortunate enough to be left behind,

One year goes by in the blink of an eye But the memories remain as livid as ever.

Any pandemic is crushing. COVID-19 is no exception. It strains cognition and emotion. It tanks economies. It disrupts communication. It alters psychology. It breeds panic and paranoia.

Among the most iconic characters of popular Bangla literature, Masud Rana’s name is synonymous with that of its author, Kazi Anwar Hossain.