Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own. Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left ... more >
What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland An entertaining and enlightening book about how ancient peoples dealt with death—and what we might learn from them A lively story of death, What to Expect When You’re Dead explores the fascinating death-related ... more >
Bookish suffragist Catriona Campbell is busy: An ailing estate, academic writer’s block, a tense time for England’s women’s rights campaign—the last thing she needs is to be stuck playing host to her father’s distractingly attractive young colleague. Deeply introverted Catriona lives for her work at Oxford and her fight for ... more >
As a snowfall blankets 8th century Mosul, a Persian noblewoman arrives at the home of the scholar Dabir and his friend the swordsman Captain Asim. Najya has escaped from a dangerous cabal that has ensorcelled her to track down ancient magical tools of tremendous power, the bones of the old ... more >
“This is the story of Rodriga de Perolles; of how she rescued the bastard renegade Marco from death and was rescued herself by the squire Piers; of how she joined with her father, the penniless and independent Sir Landry, in search for witnesses that would bring Piers his rightful inheritance; ... more >
The warm and winning story of opening a modern bookstore where there were none, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller recounts Nadia Wassef’s troubles and triumphs as a founder and manager of Cairo-based Diwan The streets of Cairo make strange music. The echoing calls to prayer; the raging insults ... more >