What We've Been Reading: April 2023

Welcome! You've reached the place where we, on a monthly basis, gather up what the Lighthouse team are currently reading. You can check out round-ups from previous months amongst our Read Think Act posts.

Noor

Dragonfall by L.R.. Lam - Read it in one night, a very fun heisty-dragon book with plague, conspiracies and genderfluid characters.

Your Wish is My Command by Deena Mohammed - a really beautiful and moving series of stories that blend classic genie-in-a-bottle stories with modern day troubles and politics.

Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty - a thoughtful, compassionate and thought-provoking account by a forensic anthropologist about the aftermath of genocide. Hagerty explores how important it is to keep searching for the disappeared, to learn what happened to them, and to return their bodies to their families to "lift the lid off sadness" and enable accountability mechanisms to move forward.

Trisha

Striking Women by Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson - incredibly tells the often neglected stories of migrants role in the trade union movement focusing on two key historical disputes that are crucial to understanding strike action today!

Mairi

Weyward by Emilia Hart - the critical moments of 3 women across as many centuries, it's witchy and earthy and very readable even where it is dark (TW for domestic violence)

Jim

A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick - a philosophical murder mystery set on a distant planet. Think Agatha Christie meets esoteric theology....in outer space!

Jess

We, the Heartbroken by Gargi Bhattacharyya - Bottomless sadness and hope are often depicted as opposites, camps to be chosen between in effort to transform our world. This is the book to completely trash that division, and I'm so grateful for it. Heartbreak is the honest place to start from in a world that broke our hearts.

Christina

After Noor and Mairi and Rachel, I am finally also reading Babel by R.F. Kuang, and it is so brilliant!!! Babel has me so thoroughly in its narrative grasp that I've been taking it with me everywhere despite it being a 500+ page hardback, even on Edinburgh's hilliest cycle paths.

I've also been reading Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert, after reading the other two books in the trilogy over the past years. I just love Hibbert's writing and characters, her books are always thoughtful, warm, hopeful and sexy.