What We've Been Reading: Feb 2025

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for February 2025!

This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month. You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our Read Think Act posts.

This time round, we’ve been spending time with a Rastafari community in 1980’s Bristol, diving into wisdom about parenting when neurodivergent, and going on wild rides through Studio Ghibli-esque worlds. There’s also a peak at Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s new nesting-doll of a novel!

Mohamed

The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha - This is the Egyptian generational family saga that I’ve been waiting for. Told in an epistolary form, the narrative is relayed through letters from Nour to his estranged sister Shimo following their mother’s death, when he’s struck by visions of events in his mother’s life that he wasn’t there to witness. Through the novel we get to know Amna, Nimo and Mouna, three names for each of the lives the narrator’s mother inhabited. Beginning in the 1950’s, this novel paints a vivid, yet amorphous portrait of a country that’s constantly in flux, from the Nasser years all the way through to the 2011 Revolution and its aftermaths. The Dissenters, carried by Rakha’s lyrical and expansive prose, was painful at times and broke my heart - can’t recommend it enough.

JJ

Fast by the Horns by Moses McKenzie - written entirely in iyaric (dread talk) this novel follows the political and social tensions in a Rastafari community in 1980s Bristol. It's completely captivated me this month.

Jim

Parenting When You're Autistic by Pooky Knightsmith - A sorely-needed, partly crowdsourced guide to being an autistic parent. Includes great advice on self-care, balancing needs and affirming yourself in a world already full of neurotypical parenting books.

Christina

Have been really enjoying reading Antichristie by Mithu Sanyal, which is sharp and funny and spiky. It’s not translated yet and I haven’t read Identitti yet BUT I hear it is excellent, so I’ll gladly recommend it!

I am re-reading Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer which is out in translation in May - it is a vivid and funny and strange ouroboros of a novel, repeating the same night over and over, preparing meals for friends/enemies. Everyone is kind of rude to each other and is also trying to love one another. You can pre-order it now!

Also reading: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Noor

Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao is a beautiful, whimsical, and seriously dazzling ride through Studio Ghibli-esque worlds and a love story that is all things gentle, tumultuous and hopeful. The characters travel through origami paper-folding doors that bend time and space, investigate museums of memories that look like paper cranes, and gamble at high stakes games to find the source of rumours. It's a book about how we handle the consequences of our choices and how far we'll go to have the freedom to choose.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang - Well, she's done it again. Han Kang's new novel is a nesting doll of reflections and perspectives contemplating how one lives through, and with, terrible violence. The central concern of the novel is the friendship of two women who have been through much together. Now, Inseon is in hospital and needs Kyungha's help. And so Kyungha begins on a journey that will have her falling through history as she contemplates the cruelty of dementia, violence against women, and the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians on Jeju Island in 1948.

Also reading: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Hannah

“For empire has no pity and is never sated”

The Vaster Wilds by Layren Groff follows a many named (yet nameless) escapee from a disease ravaged settlement in early US colonial days. Her solo survivalist journey, against an onslaught of obstacles, and with no guarantee of a better life, tests her faith and world views to the limit.

Mairi

Reading: Shoulder to Shoulder by Jake Hall, Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley and Sirens by Emilia Hart.