Book post that I received from the publisher. Interestingly enough, it came along with Israel on the Brink : Eight Steps for a Better Future by Ilan Pappe. Both the books (published by HarperCollins India) arefilled with details about Israel and Palestine. It is challenging for a lay reader to make sense of it beyond gleaning what lies on the surface. Dialogue is urgently required. If books can help achieve it, then why not? Perhaps each side will pick up books about the opposite side and read it in quiet and come to their own conclusions. Hopefully, constructive dialogue rather than othering will be the positive impact.
Book blurb
This book unveils the clandestine strategies that have enabled Israel to not just survive but flourish since its founding in 1949, despite being surrounded and attacked by deadly adversaries. The Sword of Freedom is an eye-opening insider’s look into Israel’s transformation from a beleaguered nation to a formidable presence on the global stage.
Israel’s prosperity is rooted in smart strategies, carefully chosen alliances, and a society-wide understanding that there is no Plan B for the Jewish people. “It’s the job of the Israeli defense establishment to do whatever it can to put off the next war for as long as possible,” the author explains, “including using covert means.” Drawing from his vast experience in intelligence and national security, the author chronicles how Israel has consistently turned adversity into opportunity, brilliantly leveraging limited resources to maximum effect, using a range of strategies including:
Questioning all information from all sources.
Yossi Cohen served as the director of the Mossad from 2016 until 2021. As director, he personally orchestrated some of the Mossad’s most daring operations, such as the seizure of the Iranian nuclear archives—the exposure of which was among the main factors behind the United States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—and clandestine activity all over the world. In 2020, Cohen led the negotiations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. His unique work with these countries, and the important connections he forged with them, played an important role in the signing of the groundbreaking Abraham Accords. He is now the head of SoftBank Investment Advisers in Israel. Cohen and his wife, Aya, live in Israel, and are blessed with four children and eight grandchildren.
Book post that I received from the publisher. Interestingly enough, it came along with Yossi Cohen’s The Sword of Freedom. Both the books (published by HarperCollins India) arefilled with details about Israel and Palestine. It is challenging for a lay reader to make sense of it beyond gleaning what lies on the surface. Dialogue is urgently required. If books can help achieve it, then why not? Perhaps each side will pick up books about the opposite side and read it in quiet and come to their own conclusions. Hopefully, constructive dialogue rather than othering will be the positive impact.
Book blurb
Israel can’t go on like this.
7 October and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza laid bare the cracks in its foundations. It was unveiled as a country unable to protect its citizens, divided between messianic theocrats and selective liberals, resented by its neighbours and losing the support of Jews worldwide. While its leaders justify bombing campaigns exceeding the worst atrocities of World War 2 and a spiralling humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, Israel is becoming a pariah state. Its worst enemy is not Hamas, but itself.
Ilan Pappe paves a path out of the Jewish state, rooted in restorative justice and decolonisation, including the return of refugees, the end of illegal settlements, and building bridges with the Arab world. The future can be one of reconciliation, not endless war.
Ilan Pappe is Professor of History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of over a dozen books, including the bestselling The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. In 2017, he received the Middle East Monitor’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palestine Book Awards.
Oh, this book is purely delicious. Its his love for food and all things nice. Its evocative. Every page is infused with his love for the sensuous and tactile. He knows colours, food, observes precisely and has the ability to transport a reader with a short essay into a different world..sometimes his experiences are uber-luxurious and wow! He shares them with so much grace and panache.
In The Health and Wealth Paradox, Ankush Datar and Mihir Patki present a set of principles. These principles of health and wealth are known already to everyone but the emphasis that the authors place on them being so intertwined with each other that one can learn from either discipline and apply those lessons to both. Principles such as less is more, your plan is your north star, delayed gratification, and to never judge a book by its cover. These also lend themselves to the chapter titles. Based on decades of their combined experiences in overcoming lifestyle diseases, creating sustainable patterns of healthy eating and workouts without compromising on occasional binges, and building a robust investment process for wealth creation, Datar and Patki bust popular myths, provide an actionable toolkit and endeavour to bring sanity back to the lives of many who have given up on the idea of having health and wealth together.
Ankush Datar is an investment professional, health and fitness enthusiast, and writer. He has been working in the professional investing field for the last eight years and is currently associated with PhillipCapital India in their portfolio-management services fund-management team, giving him a ringside view of the investing profession. He is a marathon runner and weightlifter, and has been doing both for the last fifteen years. He has also contributed articles to financial-services publications, appeared on podcasts and written blogs for health-tech startups and brands. He writes a personal blog on investing, health and psychology, and how these disciplines converge.
Mihir Patki is an investment professional with a deep passion for personal finance and nutrition. He started his career at Deloitte before transitioning to various capital markets roles with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JM Financial. From 2013 to 2020, Mihir led CVK Advisors, a boutique advisory firm where he focused on special situations credit. In 2020, he co-founded Multipie, a social network for investors that grew into a vibrant community of over 1 lakh members from novices to seasoned experts. Multipie was acquired by ICICI Securities in 2022. Mihir currently works with Tata Capital’s structured finance team. He is a chartered accountant and holds an MBA from the University of Oxford.
One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.
Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and writer. She is the author of the celebrated Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Her writing on science has appeared in National Geographic, Nature, The Guardian and The Atlantic, among others. Born in the UK, she lives in Paris.
Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self : Excursions in Exile ( HarperCollins India) is a collection of essays written over a period of time. The opening essay begins with the loss of his Overseas Citizenship of India in 2019. It was revoked by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. As a result, Aatish, a British citizen, has been unable to visit India, the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity and, in the process, compelled him to ask broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and nationality. According to Wikipedia, Aatish Taseer became a US citizen on 27 July 2020.
In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist facade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated here, is practiced so little. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?
In this blend of travelogue and memoir, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes a politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and delves deep into the heart of the migrations that define our multicultural world.
He acknowledges the “ambition, inspiration and, at times, sheer relentlessness of Hanya Yanagihara” without whom this book would not have been possible. Hanya Yanagihara is an incredibly powerful writer in her own right, with a powerful eye for detail, but more than that, she has the knack of embodying her written word with a force, an energy, that makes her works unforgettable. It is a rare talent. Aatish is fortunate to have her as his mentor. As he asks, who else would commission an eighteen-thousand-word piece on pilgrimage? In A Return to Self, Aatish Taseer has truly transformed as a writer. As writer and academic Amitava Kumar puts it eloquently, “Writers I admire travel to discover other states of mind. But the even more admirable ones travel also to find new parts of their most authentic selves. In these pages, Taseer is such a traveller: the maps he is working with are those of the world, and also of the body, the soul, and the senses. His findings are fascinating and rich.” The book extract that has been published on Moneycontrol is from Aatish Taseer’s trip to Mongolia. The peace at the centre of this travelogue is extremely powerful and this section of the book begs to be read over and over again.
With this book, Aatish’s voice is much stronger, clearer, sharper, and very sure of himself. He has made choices or they have been foisted upon him. No one is questionning the impact of those decisions made, but the quiet strength and steely determination that imbues this book, even in the extraordinary sections of meditative reflection, ensures his space on the literary stage in a powerful manner. Much to look forward to in the future with regard to Aatish’s literary ouevre — before and after 2019.
Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands; the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon; and the memoir and travelogue The Twice-Born. He is also the translator, from the Urdu, of Manto: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Born in England, raised in New Delhi, and educated in the United States, Taseer now lives in New York.
Manish Gaekwad was the only child of a courtesan, so he grew up in the kothas or a brothel. Courtesans would be defined as prostitutes but usually one man (patron) took care of her and her children. The evening festivies inevitably began with a mujra or a performance. It included singing and dancing by the courtesan (s), accompanied by their musicians, and watched by an audience consisting of their patrons. Manish Gaekwad was sent by his mother to the hills to study where he acquired an education in English. His mother did her best to ensure that he did not get stuck in poverty and on the margins of society.
Writing two memoirs in quick succession, one about his mother and the other about himself, is quite a feat. There is plenty of linguistic play in his storytelling, with loads of Hindi that is also made available in English but it is almost as if both languages have equal status in his mind. Memoirs inevitably are selective storytelling about a person’s life and sometimes of their community, their context. In Manish Gaekwad’s books, there is a continuity of narrative but at the same time many incidents seem episodic. As if they had to be written down and shared. There is also this emphasis on telling his mother’s story, making her life visible, a woman who lives in the shadow of society, but her son gives her a voice, a character. In his own story, it is not necessarily a coming-of-age story but it is certainly a juxtaposition of the public and private worlds in which the idea of masculinity is explored. In the public spaces, the men and boys linked to the courtesans are encouraged to figure out their relationships and if need be, have the necessary scuffle to assert their dominance. In the shadows of the kotha, it is predatory and seeing a young boy/man like Manish, they prey upon him and sexually assault him more than once. Both these texts are seeped in violence — whether the energy required by the fittest to survive or the violent “love” and its multiple shades. Ultimately, these books attempt to share unique experiences but one cannot help but think of it also as performance art. But, then isn’t most storytelling?
Manish Gaekwad is a journalist and author. He has reported for Scroll and Mid-Day, and has contributed to The Hindu and other publications as a freelancer. His literary works include the novel Lean Days and The Last Courtesan, a memoir of his mother. He co-wrote the Netflix series She with Imtiaz Ali, script-consulted on Badhaai Do and served as a senior script creative at Red Chillies Entertainment.
Both books have been published by HarperCollins India.
I was sent a review copy of this book by HarperCollins India. It made me curious about the Ozempic drug. Suddenly, news about it was visible everywhere. I am a little sceptical about it since it is a chemical composition that is ostensibly for diabetics but is increasingly being used to fight obesity. It has made the Danish company, Novo Nordisk, one of the richest companies globally, not just in pharmaceutical. It is worth more than half a trillion dollars at present and growing, day by day. Ozempic has become so popular that there is always a short supply of this drug in the market. As a result, other pharma companies are creating the drug and marketing it. The Australian government is trying to regulate the use of this drug while recognising its benefits. Other countries are also beginning to document the lesser known side effects of this drug such as gastric disorders and pancreatis. There have been some instances of blindness and deaths linked to the use of Ozempic too but in a small number so as to not mar the popular use as well as recommendation by doctors of the drug. Novo Nordisk is aware of these deaths. Even in India there are discussions about it, with doctors advising its use with caution.
Ozempic, as a diabetes drug, was first launched in the market in 2017, after nearly two decades of research. When its impact on obesity was noticed, then four years later, in 2021, Wegovy ( the brand name) was launched.
Watch this video about the scientist behind this discovery:
While Ozempic has become a roaring success primarily because it fights obesity, but it has also proven to be a profitable venture for Novo Nordisk, it now has a fair share of its critics as well. In July 2025, a lawsuit was filed in the USA. Nevertheless, despite advertisements for medicines not being permitted by law in Denmark, some have been created and posted (here and here). Most likely in a different land but social media ensures that these advertisements are visible across the world.
Here is the book blurb of The Ozempic Revolution. I am sharing it as it is. It is very upbeat and positive about the impact of the drug. Most likely, it is useful for millions but even so, the dangerous side effects cannot be ignored.
The newest class of weight loss drugs (GLP-1s) are complete game-changers in their potential to reverse obesity and its related diseases, with nearly 50% of Americans qualifying for the use of these drugs. Already 1 in 8 Americans say they’ve tried a GLP-1 medication—but with many acquiring their prescription from online pharmacies, med spas, and general practitioners, they face a huge gap between trying the drug and achieving their health goals with it long-term.
That’s where The Ozempic Revolution comes in. Dr. Alexandra Sowa, a leading obesity medicine specialist, will share her expertise on this much-discussed but largely misunderstood class of medications. Traditional and social media has been flooded with junk information and stigmatizing headlines about GLP-1s, and in this book Dr. Sowa digs into all of it—the good, the bad, and the ugly—bringing the science to light.
Having helped thousands of patients achieve weight health, Dr. Sowa knows that obesity is a complex disease. Few doctors are equipped to provide guidance on the mix of issues, both physical and emotional, that can complicate maintaining a healthy weight. A pioneer in the use of GLP-1s, Dr. Sowa emphasizes that they’re not a silver bullet, and this book takes a comprehensive approach by recommending diet and lifestyle interventions that help people stay safe and feel great while on these drugs, especially during the period when their bodies are adjusting. Using the book’s unique nonrestrictive food plans and strategies for managing the mental health challenges of losing weight, readers will learn how to push through old behaviors and beliefs so these new medications can do their jobs.
This clear-eyed, fully informed approach to GLP-1s will help anyone who is considering them make the right decision, and guarantee success for anyone taking them by helping them not only lose the weight but keep it off for good.
Dr. Alexandra Sowa is a trailblazer in obesity medicine, known for her unique blend of scientific rigor and thoughtful patient advocacy. Her dual certification in internal medicine and obesity medicine, along with her role as a clinical instructor at NYU School of Medicine, sets her apart as an expert deeply committed to advancing treatment paradigms. Through SoWell Health, she extends her reach beyond the clinic, offering innovative telehealth services and resources that reflect her philosophy of care—holistic, evidence-based, and deeply respectful of the emotional dimensions of health. A frequent contributor to major publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic and a regular expert on national broadcasts, Dr. Sowa educates on the complexities of obesity with clarity and compassion.
A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.
As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia–India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait–were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.
It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas.
And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.
Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.
Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.
Sam Dalrymple’s book is based on research that includes previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, including common people, Shattered Lands is an attempt to revisit a pivotal moment in the Indian subcontinent’s history. Ideally it should be remembered as a moment of independence from the British colonial power but increasingly, particularly, post-1984*, it is remembered as “Partition”. Whichever way it is seen, the fact remains that this is a time that has had a massive impact on the nations it spawned. If modern generations remembered it as a moment of independence, then the hope, joy and being self-reliant would be a legacy. Constantly remembering it as a moment of partition ( a truth understandably), continues to stoke the mills of hatred, othering, and communalism, across generations, instilling prejudices that are inherited but are now manifesting themselves in a monstrously virulent form. The judicious choice of words, particularly when put on paper, and how we choose to remember has a long term impact and should be selected with care. Nevertheless, Shattered Lands : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia is a must read. It is published by HarperCollins India.
I interviewed him for TOI Bookmark**. There is always so much to learn from these conversations that we record for TOI Bookmark. Sam Dalrymple is a new voice that has burst upon the scene with his debut non-fiction Shattered Lands: : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is published by HarperCollins India. In less than a month of its release on 19 June 2025, it has created a stir globally.
This was the first audio podcast that Sam Dalrymple recorded for his book. We had a freewheeling conversation about his book, his research methodology and the early reception to his book.
Here is a snippet from the conversation:
So, the story I wanted to tell is the story of how 100 years ago today India encompassed not just India and Pakistan as we know today but also encompassed twelve nation states. You have got Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. And the idea that this was just the whole of India for British administered purposes. You have very real consequences of all these people being given Indian passports and invited into the Indian Army etc. Such that in the 1920s, you have many Burmese politicians are Indian nationalists, as are Yemeni politicians. You have Yemenis considering themselves as Indians which is a thing that we have completely forgotten.
Here is the episode of TOI Bookmark on Spotify:
Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian, film-maker and multimedia producer. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 and his animated series, Lost Migrations, sold out at the British Film Institute the same year. His work has been published in the New York Times, Spectator and featured in TIME, The New Yorker and The Economist. He is a columnist for Architectural Digest and, in 2025, Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. Shattered Lands is his first book.
16 July 2025
*1984 is a significant year in modern Indian history as on 31 Oct 1984, the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her security guards. It resulted in the worst communal riots that many parts of the country, especially the capital Delhi had witnessed. Many Sikhs were killed. The violence was unimaginable. The flag marches. The silence. The pieces of burnt paper fluttering down quietly on to roof tops and terraces while one could hear mobs on the rampage in the distance. Everywhere that one looked, there was only smoke spiralling upwards to be seen. It was a mere thirty-seven years after Indian independence achieved on 15 August 1947. So, there were still many living who remembered the events of 1947. Coincidentally, at this time, the state television, Doordarshan, broadcast the TV adapatation of Bhisham Sahni’s classic Tamas. The concatenation of events was ghastly. At the time, in the camps set up for the victims fleeing the mobs or whose homes and families had been destroyed in the violence, suddenly memories of the trauma of partition came out. These were recorded by many, many organisations and individuals. It was very new. It was being documented for the first time. It made sense to do so. Probably no one realised the long term consequences of entrapping history to a word and the way it should be viewed in one sense at the cost of another instead of as a balanced perspective. Now, 1947 is mostly remembered as “Partition” and not “Independence”. Sad, but true.
** TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. Till date, I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Non-fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.
Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.
No parent should ever have to outlive their children. Unfortunately, Yiyun Li and her husband, lost both their sons. Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, and James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow (published by HarperCollins India), Yiyun Li makes the case for “radical acceptance”. Reality which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken in the most straightforward language. Over and over again, she refers to the facts that one gathers. It is a fact. The emotional quotient is not necessarily addressed or considered sufficiently signifcant to be mentioned in the book. In fact, she says, while addressing the reader very early on in the book, if you think suicide is too depressing a subject; if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you; and if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, this is a good time to stop reading. (p.25). To live after these events in her life, almost as she recognises worthy of a Greek tragedy, requires the radical acceptance that she suggests. It is the only way to live each day. She relies upon the garden metaphor. In fact, she was encouraged to take up garderning by William Trevor.
I’ve come to understand Trevor’s point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too. Would it have changed Vincent a little, had he had the opportunity to work on the garden with me for a season, several seasons? Better stop asking these questions that tread in the realm of alternatives — whatever the answer is doesn’t make a difference in this life.
And one must garden as realistically as one lives after the deaths of one’s children. One must, especially, refrain from giving the flowers and plants metaphorical or symbolic meaning beyond nature’s mere way of being.
(p.79-80)
Things in Nature Merely Grow is a moving tribute by Yiyun Li to her second son, James. It is also a meditation on grief by a parent who is hurting and oddly enough a manual for mourners, on how to offer their condolences to the bereaved family.
Interestingly enough, David Nicholls wrote about it on his Instagram account too. I replied to him. Not only he, but Helen Fielding too ( author of Bridget Jones Diary) liked my response.
Read it.
Yiyun Li is the author of ten books, including The Book of Goose, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award; Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, PEN/Malamud Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, among other honours. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
