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The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam
The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth’s secret outreach to the Muslim world, which set England on the path to empire, by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps
We think of England as a great power whose empire once stretched from India to the Americas, but when Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen, it was just a tiny and rebellious Protestant island on the fringes of Europe, confronting the combined power of the papacy and of Catholic Spain. Broke and under siege, the young queen sought to build new alliances with the great powers of the Muslim world. She sent an emissary to the Shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, with whom she shared a lively correspondence.The Sultan and the Queen tells the riveting and largely unknown story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes—and reveals how Elizabeth’s fruitful alignment with the Islamic world, financed by England’s first joint stock companies, paved the way for its transformation into a global commercial empire.
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Secret Son By Laila Lalami
Secret Son By Laila Lalami is about a wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends.
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An Unrestored Woman By Shobha Rao
In her mesmerizing debut, Shobha Rao recounts the untold human costs of one of the largest migrations in history.
1947: the Indian subcontinent is partitioned into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. And with one decree, countless lives are changed forever.
An Unrestored Woman explores the fault lines in this mass displacement of humanity: a new mother is trapped on the wrong side of the border; a soldier finds the love of his life but is powerless to act on it; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage. Caught in a world of shifting borders, Rao’s characters have reached their tipping points.
In paired stories that hail from India and Pakistan to the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the violent uprooting of families, the price they pay over generations, and the uncanny relevance these stories have in our world today.
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Three Daughters of Eve By Elif Shafak [Hardcover]
In Three Daughters of Eve By Elif Shafak, she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world.
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The Breakdown by B.A. Paris [That Night]
‘A psychological page-turner’ – Good Housekeeping
If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?
It all started that night in the woods.
Cass Anderson didn’t stop to help the woman in the car, and now she’s dead.
Ever since, silent calls have been plaguing Cass and she’s sure someone is watching her.
Consumed by guilt, she’s also starting to forget things. Whether she took her pills, what her house alarm code is – and if the knife in the kitchen really had blood on it.
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A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie [Red/Blue Cover]
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie is about a Young Englishwoman in summer, 1914. Vivian Rose Spencer is in an ancient land, about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure, and love.
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City of Veils By Zoe Ferraris
Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic tradition. But Katya, one of the few women in the medical examiner’s office, is determined to make her work mean something.
When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, detectives are ready to dismiss the case as another unsolvable murder. Only Katya is convinced that the victim can be identified and her killer found.
Katya soon discovers that the dead girl was a young filmmaker named Leila whose controversial documentaries earned her many enemies. Was it Leila’s connection to an incendiary Koranic scholar or a missing American man that got her killed?
In CITY OF VEILS, the award-winning novelist Zoë Ferraris combines a thrilling, fast-paced mystery with a rare and intimate look into women’s lives in the Middle East.
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors By Nayomi Munaweera
Before violence tore apart the tapestry of Sri Lanka and turned its pristine beaches red, there were two families; two young women, ripe for love with hopes for the future; and a chance encounter that leads to the terrible heritage they must reckon with for years to come.
One tragic moment that defines the fate of these women and their families will haunt their choices for decades to come. In the end, love and longing promise only an uneasy peace.
A sweeping saga with the intimacy of a memoir that brings to mind epic fiction like The Kite Runner and The God of Small Things, Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrorsstrikes mercilessly at the heart of war. It offers an unparalleled portrait of a beautiful land during its most difficult moments.
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Laughing All the Way to the Mosque By Zarqa Nawaz
Being a practicing Muslim in the West is sometimes challenging, sometimes rewarding and sometimes downright absurd. How do you explain why Eid never falls on the same date each year; why it is that Halal butchers also sell teapots and alarm clocks; how do you make clear to the plumber that it’s essential the toilet is installed within sitting-arm’s reach of the tap?
Little Mosque on the Prairie brought Zarqa’s own laugh-out-loud take on her everyday culture clash to viewers around the world. And now, in Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, she tells the sometimes absurd, sometimes challenging, always funny stories of being Zarqa in a western society. From explaining to the plumber why the toilet must be within sitting arm’s reach of the water tap (hint: it involves a watering can and a Muslim obsession with cleanliness “down there”) to urging the electrician to place an eye-height electrical socket for her father-in-law’s epilepsy-inducing light-up picture of the Kaaba, Zarqa paints a hilarious portrait of growing up in a household where, according to her father, the Quran says it’s okay to eat at McDonald’s-but only if you order the McFish.
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Amina’s Voice By Hena Khan [Paperback]
Amina’s Voice By Hena Khan brings to life the joys and challenges of a young Pakistani American and highlights the many ways in which one girl’s voice can help bring a diverse community together to love and support each other.
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The Invisibles By Cecilia Galante
Thrown together by chance as teenagers at Turning Winds Home for Girls, Nora, Ozzie, Monica, and Grace quickly bond over their troubled pasts and form their own family which they dub The Invisibles. But when tragedy strikes after graduation, Nora is left to deal with the horrifying aftermath alone as the other three girls leave home and don’t look back.
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The Writing on My Forehead By Nafisa Haji
The Writing on My Forehead By Nafisa Haji is about a free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, willful, intelligent Saira Qader rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, making the world her home.