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A multitude of wonderful voices
From Lebanon to Pakistan, there is a whole host of female Muslim voices in this wonderful pioneering collection.

Some of the stand out stories, essays and poems include a man reconnecting with art through a woman's eyes, to political stories about the apartheid state of Palestine, so-called "honour crimes", and the illegal war in Iraq. The writers involved are award-winning authors such as Kamila Shamsie, actors, and even a young 15 year old poet - all based in the UK.

It avoids stereotypes and instead advocates quite a humanist outlook on femininity - that a person is complex, with a full range of emotions rather than just the standard media portrayal. A wonderful plethora of diversity.
  
A Hundred Veils
A Hundred Veils
Rea Keech | 2015 | Fiction & Poetry, History & Politics
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Good pacing, wonderful descriptions (0 more)
Pretty good book
So the book is set at the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution – Marco is an American English teacher who’s come to Iran for a year. While there, he falls in love with his roommate’s cousin. The book is really their love story, while surrounded by political and religious unrest.

The writing is excellent. I’m sure I would get more out of the book if I could read Farsi, as each chapter is begun by a few lines of poetry in Farsi, written in both Arabic script and English letters. But the pacing is perfect, the descriptions apt – I really enjoyed this book.

Read my full review at https://goddessinthestacks.wordpress.com/2017/08/22/book-review-a-hundred-veils/
  
The Scarfolk Annual 197*
The Scarfolk Annual 197*
Richard Littler | 2019 | Horror, Humor & Comedy
8
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Deeply twisted parody/satire manages to be unpleasantly disturbing and consistently funny throughout. You kind of have to be familiar with the conceit of Scarfolk - a 'lost' town in the north of England, trapped in the 1970s and run as a brutally right-wing totalitarian dystopia - to get the joke here, but the recreation of the sort of useless filler that made up the bulk of children's annuals in the 1970s is brilliantly done. The inventiveness and attention to detail is consistently impressive, and most of the jokes connect - there's a combination of silliness, savage political satire, and League of Gentlemen style macabreness that certainly won't be to all tastes. Gets the balance between horror and humour just about right; very funny, but also undeniably disturbing.