mothers

Book 31 for 2026: “The Lion Women of Tehran”, Marjan Kamali

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This novel narrates the lives of two women who became best friends in elementary school in Tehran in the 1950s. One, Elaheh, who has lived in luxury until the death of her father forces her and her mother to move to a poor part of the city. Two, Homa, a rambunctious seven year old who lives nearby. Elaheh’s mother has no choice but to enroll her in the nearby public school where they meet and become best friends against the objection of Elaheh’s mother who thinks the people there are tacky and beneath her. Because Elaheh’s (Ellie) prefers to spend time at Homa’s house where there is an entire family–father, mother, children, who are warm and loving, her mother does various things to keep her from Homa’s family. It does not work and Homa’s mother teaches Ellie how to cook and they treat her as one of the own.

Their happy friendship is disrupted when Ellie’s mother marries her former husband’s brother and they move back to the wealthy part of town and Ellie is enrolled in one of the best schools in Tehran. Ellie works hard at her studies and becoming popular and succeeds. She is very embarrassed when Homa gets a scholarship to this school and shows up. Nevertheless, they reestablish their friendship and everything seems to go well until political turmoil occurs. They finish high school and enroll in the University of Tehran. Then betrayal and disaster ensues.

I could not stop reading because of the story. For those who know little of Iranian history in the last 100 years, through the events in the novel, the reader not only learns how difficult life can be in Iran but also a lot of recent Iranian history. It reveals the determination of Iranians to live the best they can regardless of the circumstances and how life can change instantly because of someone’s misguided words. After I finished this novel, I went to the library and requested Kamali’s other two novels.

Book 29 for 2026: “The God of Small Things”, Arundhati Roy

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The Booker Prize winner from decades ago, I decided to reread it (I read it when it was first published) after reading the author’s recent memoir. It is1969 in the southern Indian state of Kerala where a substantial proportion of the population belong to the Syrian Christian church. Does this keep them from adhering to the Indian caste system? No. Caste, wealth, social status, property–they all still matter.

The main characters are one family: Ammu and her twin children who love the wrong man according to their society, the blind grandmother who plays Handel on her violin, their uncle who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and married and then divorced an English woman, their child, and an ex-nun grandaunt who is not a nice person and cannot get over her love for a priest. And then there are their servants and the man, an Untouchable, who is the brilliant carpenter, mechanic, fixer of everything. When the half English child and her mother come to visit after her new husband’s untimely death, everything changes in a day.

Even though written decades ago, the novel is definitely worth the read. Although the details and cultural representations are true to one particular area of India and its culture, the novel’s themes ring true for all cultures and countries, themes of Love, Joy, Hate, Prejudice, Hope.

Note: I also decided to research how much the caste system has changed life in the decades since it was written. In urban areas with new laws there is more leniency regarding rights especially for work and education, but people still usually marry those from the same caste. Rural areas have not changed much to the point that many villages still have a specific area where the Dalits (Untouchables) have to live.

Book 27 for 2026: “Mother Mary Comes To Me”, Arundhati Roy

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Although Roy has written numerous books including the Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things”, this is her first memoir. While the prose is easy to read, the subject matter is often heart wrenching. Roy’s mother, a single parent (divorced) in India when this was totally unacceptable, accomplishes remarkable achievements including the founding of a very successful school while acting what often seems very cruel as a mother to her two children, Arundhati and her brother. The mother’s treatment of Arundhati is so disturbing that when she is just 18 and in her third year of architecture school in Delhi, she quits going home to Kerala to see her mother and quits communicating with her for seven years. Yet, she admits to loving her mother irrationally.

Arundhati becomes involved in documentary film making, sometimes as writer and sometimes as an actor in the films. In addition to her activities as a writer and film maker, she becomes an ardent political activist against rising Hindu nationalism. She provides details of spending time with hunted activists in the jungle, getting arrested, and even tried for writing a piece the judiciary considered insulting. This is an unusually honest and intimate memoir about her family, her mother, and life and politics in India.

Book 26 for 2026: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, Kiran Desai

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By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.

Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.

Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.

Book 24 for 2026: “Glory Be”, Danielle Arceneaux

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This is a murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana. The main character is an older Black lady who spends Sunday afternoons after church at the local coffee shop helping gamblers with their sports betting. While there, she learns that her best friend, a nun, has been found dead in her apartment. The police insist it is a suicide, but Glory knows that cannot be and sets out to find out what really occurred and who the murderer is. Her daughter, a classy NYC attorney, is visiting. She is very reluctant to join her mother’s quest but eventually agrees to help. Together they begin to investigate. After Glory is bitten by a pit bull under scary circumstances. receives a package full of bees which sting her and send her to the hospital, and other unexpected occurrences, Glory’s daughter realizes her mother may be correct about this being a murder, not a suicide. Their investigation leads them to the trailer house of a priestess, the grounds of a notorious drug dealer, etc.

Glory has grown up during segregation and is used to being overlooked and dismissed. Although she is in many ways a very traditional woman with traditional values, she is determined to do right by her friend. This leads her to places she would never n normally go and encounter people she would normally avoid.

I rarely read murder mysteries but since this is a book in a book club to which I belong, I read it anyway. It was an enjoyable read, sometimes funny, and certainly a glimpse into bayou culture about which I know little. I think there is a sequel so might look for it since I enjoyed Glory’s spunk and determination.

Book 22 for 2026: “A Guardian and a Thief”, Megha Majumdar

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In the not too distant future the city of Kolkata in India is besieged with floods and famine. Ma, her elderly father, and two year old daughter are preparing to emigrate to the US where her husband has a good professional job. This is one of the families in the story. The other is a poor family from the Sundarban struggling to stay alive while the oldest son, Boomba, has gone to Kolkata to try to earn enough to save his family.

In the two weeks time of this novel, Boomba, driven to desperation and holding a secret about Ma, breaks into Ma’s house and steals her purse which contains the passports for her, her father, and her child. Both her actions previous to his, her current actions, and Boomba’s lead both down paths they could never have previously dreamed with dire consequences for all.

Due to the flooding and famine, everyone in the city is desperate except for the one billionaire who has stayed. Their desperation leads some to behave in undesirable ways, but the main “lesson” of this novel illustrates how just one action by one person can lead to dire consequences for two entire families and possibly others as well–actions have consequences you can never begin to imagine. Be careful.

Book 21 for 2026: “Hurricane Season”, Fernanda Melchor

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The inside of the front cover informs the potential reader that this is a novel about a world steeped in mythology and violence, set in a small town in rural southeastern Mexico. The violence part is extreme, the kind of violence that only sometimes pervades a lot of small, rural, poverty ridden towns everywhere in the world. Written in a style reminiscent of Faulkner (I read a translation from the Spanish), each chapter tells the main story from a different perspective, the story leading up to and the death of the Witch who is found floating in the water of a canal. She is called the Witch but no one for sure seems to know her gender, where she attained the money to build such a huge house, and how she manages to entertain with lavish abandon. People both avoid her and are drawn to her.

There is the grandmother who thinks her wayward grandson can do no wrong while blaming her daughter ( the child’s mother) for everything and anything, there is his friend whom he both loves and hates, their is the poor girl he aids and loves who has been groomed and impregnated by her stepfather and has run away because of it, the engineer who loves boys and men, the woman who makes her living as a fancy prostitute to support her disabled husband and on and on it goes–people harming each other out of anger and frustration with their dire circumstances. For some of the characters, the writing is first person so the reader learns the interworkings of those mentally harmed by their life’s poverty and environment from which there appears to be no escape.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart.

Book 19 for 2026: “An Unnecessary Woman”, Rabih Alameddine

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Aaliya Saleh, 72, lives alone in an apartment in Beirut. Her obsession is reading books and translating books into Arabic. Every January she starts a new translation. Upon completion, she stores the translation in a box and puts it in the spare bedroom. No one ever sees them or reads them. Her family members envy her large apartment because she is divorced and has no children–her brothers think they should have it because they are married and have children. Her mother is a difficult woman and has become stricken with mild dementia. Written in first person, Aaliya relates her life as she sees it. Her impotent husband walks out and she is fine with this because he is a difficult person. Living alone she is able to defy norms and customs and lives as she chooses, a reclusive life for the most part except for her decades long job running a small bookstore. During her telling in the novel she is now retired with some relatively minor aches and pains. She has managed to live as she chooses in spite of the Civil War, repeated bombing by the Israelis, and other difficulties. Toward the end, an unthinkable disaster occurs that threatens what she views as her life’s purpose.

This character’s prodigious reading and knowledge of literature and authors inspired me to look up authors I had not read, learn more about them, and go to the bookstore and library in search of some of the books she discusses in the novel. It also made me think more about how societies see women as unnecessary (or worse) if they fail to comply with societal norms. This novel’s setting may be Beirut, but it could be anywhere in the world in terms of the price women often pay when they defy cultural norms and live as they choose.

Book 18 for 2026: “The Hakawati”, Rabih Alameddine

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In Lebanese, a hakawati is a traditional teller of legends, tales, all sorts of stories. Two basic sets of stories run parallel in this 500 plus page novel. One set is the family story of the narrator whose grandfather was a famous hakawati. This part of the novel portrays life in contemporary Lebanon and the life of the narrator who emigrated to the US to attend UCLA engineering school and stayed in the US. He tells about his family history and his growing up, the various invasions of Israel into Lebanon and how it affected his family and friends, and how his family deals with their blended ethnicities, e.g Druze, Maronite, Orthodox. The novel alternates between this family’s story and traditional Middle Eastern tales of military heroes, jinn, magic, the underworld, etc. That portion of the novel is a sort of more modern One Thousand and One Nights.

My favorite quote from the novel is this: “Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.” I reread this several times and thought about how even in the same family, individuals remember an event totally differently. This novel is also a reminder that even though Lebanon is in a totally different part of the world, families everywhere are more similar than different–the likes and dislikes, the family feuds, the emotions–in this all families remain the same no matter where on Earth.

Book 17 for 2026: “The Silence of the Girls”, Pat Barker

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I read the second and third book of this trilogy first not realizing it was a trilogy until after I started the second one. Pat Barker won the Booker for another set of historical novels and this appears to be her preferred genre. Most stories about Achilles and the Trojan War focus on the viewpoint of the men fighting. This trilogy focuses on the women in and around Troy who have been captured by the Greeks and have become their slaves.

This novel’s voice is that of Briseis, who was once queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms before Achilles sacked it and murdered her husband and brothers. She is now Achilles’ slave, a battle prize. She realizes she must adapt in order to survive. She gets caught in a dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles’ with the former demanding to take her away from Achilles. Achilles refuses to fight, the Greeks start to lose, something has to be done or the Trojans will win.

Briseis is just one of thousands of women who are now the slaves of the Greeks. This is not only her story but that of all those other women who are now slaves, prostitutes, nurses, women who lay out the dead. This is their story as well as that of Achilles, Patroclus, and various other Greek men but from the viewpoint of Briseis.