Emma Donoghue – Room

‘“What’s wrong with needing?” “It’s hard to explain.” … “My teeth feel a bit better if I stop thinking about them,” she tells me. “How come?” “It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”’ Spoiler alert: this post contains major spoilers. Disclaimer: I am not claiming to be an expert on

Marleen Haushofer – Die Wand

‘Ich habe den Phantasielosen ihren Mangel nie angekreidet, manchmal habe ich sie sogar um ihn beneidet. Sie hatten ein leichteres und angenehmeres Leben als die anderen.’ ‘Ich fürchte mich auch heute noch, weil ich weiß, dass ich nur leben kann, wenn ich gewisse Dinge nicht begreife.’ Spoiler alert: this post contains some spoilers. Disclaimer: I

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor – Dust

‘… the loudest protests were created out of whispers. To protect new post-independence citizen children, like most new Kenya parents denying soul betrayals, Nyipir built illusions of another Kenya, shouting out the words of the national anthem when he could as if the volume alone would remove the rust eating into national hopes. Keeping mouths,

Oyinkan Braithwaite – My Sister, the Serial Killer

‘The knife was for her protection. You never knew with men, they wanted what they wanted when they wanted it.’ Spoiler alert: this post contains some spoilers. Disclaimer: I am not claiming to be an expert on this book or the writer. If external sources were used in this post, they are referenced. These are

Yaa Gyasi – Homegoing

‘“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story

Maisy Card – These Ghosts are Family

‘In the ground they found that they could speak to their mothers. All the women who had ever been transformed under a blood moon. They were not alone. Somehow, though they were trapped in that grave, they were everywhere, with everyone at the same time. The women told the three little girls how to blaze

Hanya Yanagihara – A Little Life

‘The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to

Azar Nafisi – Reading Lolita in Tehran

‘Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions

Juli Zeh – Unterleuten

‘Unterleuten war ein Lebensraum, eine Herkunft, ja, sogar eine Weltanschauung. Lebensräume konnten vergiftet, eine Herkunft zerstört und Weltanschauungen in ihr Gegenteil verkehrt werden.’ Spoiler alert: this post contains minor spoilers, especially relating to certain characters. Disclaimer: I am not claiming to be an expert on this book or the writer. If external sources were used

Margaret Atwood – The Testaments

‘Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience from God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but