Books of the Month | Month of the Books #13
“HOME BODY”
BY RUPI KAUR
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers comes her greatly anticipated third collection of poetry.
Rupi Kaur constantly embraces growth, and in Home Body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. Home Body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rupi Kaur (b. 1992) is an Indian-born Canadian poet, artist and performer. She rose to fame on Instagram and Tumblr through sharing her short visual poetry.
As a 21-year-old university student Rupi wrote, illustrated and self-published her first poetry collection, Milk and Honey. Next came its artistic sibling, The Sun and Her Flowers. These collections have sold over 8 million copies and have been translated into over 40 languages.
Her most recent book, Home Body, debuted #1 on bestsellers lists across the world.
Rupi’s work touches on love, loss, trauma, healing, femininity, and migration. She feels most at home when creating art or performing her poetry on stage.
Rupi Kaur was listed in the BBC 100 Women in 2017. In 2019, The New Republic named her “Writer of the Decade”.
“THE CHILDREN OF MEN”
BY P. D. JAMES
The inspiration for director Alfonso Cuarón’s modern masterpiece of a film: The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction.
Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live… and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race.
Told with P. D. James’s trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling, The Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P. D. James (1920-2014) was born in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts and served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of the Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London.
She was an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and The National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (US). She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors, stepping down from the post in August 2013.
“THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING”
BY MILAN KUNDERA
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon - a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals - while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities.
In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight - and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.
A masterpiece by one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy - and illuminates all aspects of human existence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Milan Kundera (b. 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]) is a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
Kundera had participated in the brief but heady liberalization of Czechoslovakia in 1967–68, and after the Soviet occupation of the country he refused to admit his political errors and consequently was attacked by the authorities, who banned all his works, fired him from his teaching positions, and ousted him from the Communist Party.
In 1975 Kundera was allowed to emigrate (with his wife, Věra Hrabánková) from Czechoslovakia to teach at the University of Rennes (1975–78) in France; in 1979 the Czech government stripped him of his citizenship.
In the 1970s and ’80s his novels, including The Farewell Party (1976), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), were published in France and elsewhere abroad, but until 1989 were banned in his homeland.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his most successful works, is a series of wittily ironic meditations on the modern state’s tendency to deny and obliterate human memory and historical truth.
“WANDERLAND: A SEARCH FOR MAGIC IN A LANDSCAPE”
BY JINI REDDY
Shortlisted for the 2021 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing Alone on a remote mountaintop one dark night, a woman hears a mysterious voice. Propelled by the memory and after years of dreaming about it, Jini Reddy dares to delve into the ‘wanderlands’ of Britain, heading off in search of the magical in the landscape. A London journalist with multicultural roots and a perennial outsider, she determinedly sets off on this unorthodox path. Serendipity and her inner compass guide her around the country in pursuit of the Other and a connection to Britain’s captivating natural world. Where might this lead? And if you know what it is to be Othered yourself, how might this color your experiences? And what if, in invoking the spirit of the land, ‘it’ decides to make its presence felt?
Whether following a ‘cult’ map to a hidden well that refuses to reveal itself, attempting to persuade a labyrinth to spill its secrets, embarking on a coast-to-coast pilgrimage or searching for a mystical land temple, Jini depicts a whimsical, natural Britain. Along the way, she tracks down ephemeral wild art, encounters women who worship The Goddess, falls deeper in love with her birth land and struggles – but mostly fails – to get to grips with its lore. Throughout, she rejoices in the wildness we cannot see and celebrates the natural beauty we can, while offering glimpses of her Canadian childhood and her Indian parents’ struggles in apartheid-era South Africa.
Wanderland is a book in which the heart leads, all things are possible and the Other, both wild and human, comes in from the cold. It is a paean to the joy of roaming, both figuratively and imaginatively, and to the joy of finding your place in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jini Reddy was born in Wimbledon, London and grew up in Montreal, Quebec to Indian parents who were raised in South Africa. Reddy received her B.A in Geography from Canada’s oldest university, McGill, in Montreal and her M.A. in English Literature at Avignon University in France. She also has a diploma in French Languages and Literature from Aix Marseille University and she studied Journalism at the London College of Communications. Reddy started her career in book publishing, at Penguin Books.
Her first book, Wild Times was published in 2016. It won the book prize at the British Guild of Travel Writers Awards 2017 and was a finalist at the Travel Media Awards 2017.
Reddy has also contributed to Winter, a best-selling anthology edited by Melissa Harrison and published by Elliott and Thompson, and her writing is due to appear in the forthcoming Women on Nature anthology.
When she is not working on books, she freelances as a journalist and writer.
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