Arifa Akbar's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Arifa Akbar recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Arifa Akbar's favorite book recommendations of all time.
'A novelist to watch' Sunday Times
'The Book of the Summer' Refinery29
'Hugely enjoyable romantic comedy' Metro, FIVE STARS * * * * *
'Truly beguiles... Heralds a fresh new voice in fiction' Stylist, FIVE STARS * * * * *
Frances, Bobbi, Nick and Melissa ask each other endless questions. As their relationships unfold, in person and online, they discuss sex and friendship, art and literature, politics and gender, and, of course, one another.... more
Recommended by Arifa Akbar, and 1 others. Arifa AkbarI loved how she used the blueprint of the love triangle – two young gay women get emotionally, and sexually, embroiled with an older, more urbane couple in Dublin – in a way that made it seem fresh and unexpected. Nothing feels clichéd or familiar. (Source)
Neve, the novel’s acutely intelligent narrator, is beset by financial anxiety and isolation, but can’t quite manage to extricate herself from her volatile partner, Edwyn. Told with emotional remove and bracing clarity, First Love is an account of the relationship between two catastrophically ill-suited people walking a precarious line between relative calm and explosive... more
Recommended by Arifa Akbar, and 1 others. Arifa AkbarThe novels speaks so clearly, and so chillingly, about the hard edges of intimacy. (Source)
Two twenty-something New Yorkers: Seth, awkward and shy, and Carter, the trust fund hipster. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Rising fast on the New York producing scene, they stumble across an old blues song long forgotten by history -- and everything starts to unravel. Carter is drawn far down a path that allows no return, and Seth has no choice but to... more
Recommended by Arifa Akbar, and 1 others. Arifa AkbarThis is an astonishing novel about two white American hipsters who set up a studio that remixes rare blues records. They’ve got this self-righteous authenticity to their music. ‘This is what real jazz is. This is what we’re doing. We’re giving you the real thing, unadulterated’, and so on. But, basically, it’s a ghost story. (Source)
The Impossible Fairy Tale tells the story of the nameless ‘Child’, who struggles to make a mark on the world, and her classmate Mia, whose spoiled life is everything the Child's is not.
At school, adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by soul-crushing hierarchies and an underlying menace. Then, one day after hours, the Child sneaks into the classroom to add ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks, setting in motion a series of cataclysmic events.
Graywolf Press will publish... more
Recommended by Arifa Akbar, and 1 others. Arifa AkbarHan Yujoo toys with reality, crafting scenes that might be real, but could be fantasy or imagined, too – there’s a surreal, hallucinatory quality to it. She does that so well. She sucks you in to an interrogation of reality, of how much reality is actually out there and how much of it is in our heads. (Source)
Fresh and distinctive writing from an exciting new voice in fiction, Elmet is an unforgettable novel about family, as well as a beautiful meditation on landscape.
Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy...
Recommended by Arifa Akbar, and 1 others. Arifa AkbarThis truly is a beautiful book. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t think it needed to be. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights isn’t a perfectly written book either – that’s a big part of why I love it. It is a bit sprawling, and a bit all over the place, and melodramatic. Mozely reminds me of that and I can’t wait to see her writing and her storytelling develop. (Source)
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