uk will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing. Not to mention the bitter sense of nostalgia of growing up in the 90s and early noughties, in the shadows of ‘heroine chic’ bodies and Kate Moss’ “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Karthik is a studious young boy, who has always been first admired and then mocked for this very quality. When Solnit visited Orwell’s Hertfordshire home, she discovered roses she believed to be descendants of flowers Orwell himself planted in the mid-1930s.

Indie publisher MTO Press is a social enterprise publishing literature by women and non-binary authors. A sense of hunger and desire starts here, in her hometown, as she describes how she ‘wanted sensation, to go out in the world and let it rip through me’. Solnit is at pains to point out that the book isn’t intended to be a biography, but she nonetheless illuminates Orwell’s essays, his political passions and his highly attuned engagement with the natural world. It also shed light on the turbulence that followed the Babri Masjid demolition and the BSE bomb blast and how these events shaped the life of the protagonists. Reading this book felt like writing a letter to all the places and people I once prized (and still do).Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world. Photograph: Jason Ballard/Alamy View image in fullscreen George Orwell’s former home in Wallington, Hertfordshire.

I loved the short chapters and the way they jumped around to show girlhood, teenagehood and young adulthood as a women in its entirety. She also navigates the fear of living with regrets, making bad choices and not living up to your potential. the bulk of the novel follows an unnamed narrator, as she embarks on a new relationship with a phd student. I think about all the years I have struggled to articulate myself in my own language, pushing my words into my body instead.

The book captures Mumbai in all its glory and gloom with the situations that governed the city during those times. the descriptions of a spanish summer truly transport you there - you can feel the sticky, suffocating heat radiating off the pages.