BOOKLOVES

A sharp, ornate sword—a fantastical world of war, strategy, and beating impossible odds As a child, all Marcus knew was abandonment: from his family, his dreams, his own identity. Sent to the Capital Orphanage for Boys by his uncle, Marcus is raised under former soldier Varus, effectively conditioning him from childhood to become cannon fodder […]

A powerful memoir about family, identity, and the lifelong search for belonging Crushed Azaleas is a deeply reflective memoir in which Amal Moulik revisits his childhood and adolescence as the son of an Indian diplomat. Growing up across Japan, India, the United Kingdom, and Italy, Moulik experienced a life of constant movement and cultural exposure. […]

A woman stands in the aisle of a hardware store outside Atlanta, five months pregnant, deciding between lengths of garden stake. She settles on five of them, two and a half feet long, and adds a rubber mallet, a tool belt, a camping lantern and an ultraviolet torch. Then she straps the belt on and […]

She is eleven. The house has run out of almost everything, so she goes down the garden to the neighbour’s coop and takes four eggs, leaving the rest. She cuts the mould off the bread instead of picking it out. She scrambles them in olive oil because there is no butter, puts half on the […]

She has been on the mountain for about an hour. Her records and her underwear are laid out on blankets in the grass like a yard sale, because everything here is shared. Then the man in the plumed hat counts her cash bill by bill, hands back exactly what she used to pay in monthly […]

He spends the morning being merciful. A young elven magistrate hears an open-and-shut poaching case, three men who freely admit to taking deer from a noble’s estate, and the sentence for that is hanging. He gives them a year in prison instead and considers himself decent for it, then buys their defence lawyer a drink […]