Opening Chapters

This is the second review from the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist for 2017. You can find other reviews here .   I am not sure where to begin, so I will begin with the synopsis of the book from Goodreads: From “one of Britain’s most original young writers” (The Observer), a blistering account of a marriage in crisis and a portrait of a woman caught between withdrawal and self-assertion, depression and rage. Neve, the novel’s acutely intelligent narrator, is beset by financial anxiety and isolation, but can’t quite manage to extricate herself from her volatile partner, Edwyn. Told with emotional remove and bracing clarity, First Love is an account of the relationship between two catastrophically ill-suited people walking a precarious line between relative calm and explosive confrontation. I really wanted to like the book, and some parts I did. It's raw, so much so that you feel weirdly disturbed while you're reading the book - that was t...

  This is the first of the reviews I have done on the shortlisted books for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction for the year 2017. The shortlist was announced on April 3rd, 2017. For more reviews, subscribe! Every day, there seems to be more reports coming out about the various injustices done to a woman – or rather someone who is not a man. There are the girls brutally defiled and violated on the streets in public. The child who has been repeatedly raped by her male relatives. The grandmother who was murdered in cold blood because she refused to fund her grandson’s various activities. And don’t you wish, if only things were different, if only you could do something about them. That is the premise of The Power by Naomi Alderman. Alderman’s latest has been gathering colourful reviews and has been shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017. This is the first of the six shortlisted books I have read, and I decided to pen down my th...

First of all, I would like to clarify that I abhor the idea of International Women’s Day. I hate the commercialism that is mainly associated with it. Discounts on spa packages; buy one nail polish, get another free; companies utilize this day to buy the women in their office chocolates and flowers when instead they could promote equality and provide better rights for their female employees, like perhaps better maternity leave options. But a lot of good comes from it, the main thing being dialogue.  The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) held the Women In Leadership Symposium at Abu Dhabi, UAE on 8 th and 9 th March 2016. I was lucky enough to be able to attend it for two sessions. It is definitely the most inspiring SPE event I have been to. And one thing I am definitely sure of: our stories are not unique. Everything I heard from the women is the same thing I have heard from my mother who works in the oil and gas industry as well.  For example, one of the...

Sometimes a song just takes you back, way back. Especially when the song is from a movie you recently realized was shot in a place you used to visit every summer as a child. The song’s really old, as old as my sister who can finally get a license this year. She’s quite excited, I’m apprehensive. Not because of her. Because of the concept of driving in itself. It terrifies me, having to control the movement of an entity so much bigger and heavier than me. It’s a good thing I didn’t aspire to be a pilot I think sometimes. This time though, the song reminded me of a particular summer, eleven years ago. This place that the movie was shot in, I had a love-hate relationship with it. My mother’s ancestral home was there, so we used to go every year during our summer vacation to see our grandmother and our aunts and uncles and cousins (of which we had many, some being nice while some were unbearable). There were cousins who would relentlessly tease us, they were incredibly mean and...

You're walking in the park, and suddenly, you see this beautiful yellow flower, almost golden. It’s unlike any other flower you have ever seen. What would you do? You pluck it, because it is extraordinarily beautiful and you want to keep it for yourself. It’s a thing of beauty and you do not want to share it. You like sharing your food, your clothes. But when you see something so beautiful that it takes you closer to God every time you look at it, you want to take it and keep it for yourself. Hidden from others, hidden from sunlight. The flower withers away and you know it will die soon. But you keep it hidden. You still don’t keep it in the open so it gets some air and light for fear that someone else will come along and take it from you. You would not know what you would do if something like that happens. You will break and cry all day, longing for the flower that was yours back. But the flower was never yours. And it does not belong to the person who stole it from ...

There are certain people whose names you'll never associate with their faces. It's not because of your poor memory, but rather their faces. You see, these faces are so characteristically void, that you fail to connect them to the names that seem so full of life and exudes large amounts of personality. On the other hand, there are faces you will remember for the rest of your life and know for sure to whom they belong. It's like when you hear a song and you immediately think of something that happened or a particular someone. Sometimes you wish you no longer remembered a person, but you do. And you will for the rest of your life. And you will wonder, what if things hadn't turned out to be such a disaster.