‘Factfulness’ by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

Hans Rosling Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic, statistician and public speaker. ‘Factfulness’ was the last project that he completed with the help of his daughters Ola and Anna. Sadly he passed away in 2017 to pancreatic cancer and was unable to see this book published. Thankfully, his daughters finished his work. ‘Factfulness’ teaches...

My Top 5 Books of 2020

2020 will be the year that most of us will never forget. The whole world has been shaken by the pandemic which led to numerous lockdowns. For bookworms such as myself, it only meant one thing: more time to read. Here are my top 5 books of 2020 that helped me get through it. 1....

‘The Queen’s Gambit’ by Walter Tevis

The Queen’s Gambit was published in 1983, one year before Tevis death. It took almost forty years for this title to become the most researched one, and all thanks to Netflix adaptation of the story that was released this year. Both, the novel and series are great. It is one of those books that you...

‘The Nightingale’ by Kristin Hannah

“In love we find out who we want to be, in war we find out who we are” Occupied France How true indeed. The Nightingale is a beautifully written story about  France occupied by the Nazis during  World War II. It does not however describe the battles that took place during this devastating time and...

‘The Five. The Untold Lives of The Women Killed by Jack The Ripper’ by Hallie Rubenhold

“The victims of Jack The Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and lovers. They were women. They were human beings’ Jack The Ripper To this day the identity of Jack The Ripper is unknown, yet we have documentaries made about him; we can book a tour in London and walk...

‘The subtle art of not giving a f***’ by Mark Manson

I can summarise this book in one sentence: To live a happy life Manson advise is to do not give a f**k about ‘silly’ things and have a relationship based on trust. He concludes saying that we will all die at the end. Not really a breakthrough and yet it was listed as #1 New...

‘Girl, Woman, Other’ by Bernardine Evaristo

This is a truly wonderful novel. Not surprisingly, Bernardine Evaristo was the winner of the Booker Prize 2019 and shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. The novel features 12 interconnected characters, mostly women, black and British. At first, I was put off by the way this book is written: short sentences and no...

‘The Silence of the Girls’ by Pat Barker

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles...How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’”. The Trojan War ‘The silence of the girls’ is a retelling of ‘The Iliad’ by Homer that focus on stories of women and girls who were sucked into the Trojan...

‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ by Caroline Criado Perez.

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth” Simone de Beauvoir. Man as Default Currently, there are 7.8 billion people in the world, and more than half of them are women. When you look...

‘Overdressed: The shockingly high cost of cheap fashion’ by Elizabeth L. Cline

Elizabeth L. Cline starts her journey on discovering the cost of cheap fashion by realising that she has seven pairs of identical canvas flats at the bottom of her closets which she got for $7 (discounted from $15, what a bargain!). As a typical American consumer Elizabeth was buying a new piece of clothing every...