Spring is all about new beginnings and Diwan Bookstore has the perfect spring reads recommendations for us. Read these 6 books about art, love and loss, the past, the present, and the potential of the self and some amazing food recipes.
1. Modern Art in Egypt
By Fatenn Mostafa Kanafani
Modern Art in Egypt charts the years from Muhammad Ali’s educational reforms to the mass influx of foreigners during the nineteenth century. With a focus on the al-Nahda thought movement, this book provides an overview of the key policy-makers, reformists and feminists who founded the first School of Fine Arts in Egypt, as well as cultural salons, museums and arts collectives.
By combining political and aesthetic histories, Fatenn Mostafa breaks the prevailing understanding that has preferred to see non-Western art as derivatives of Western art movements. Modern Art in Egypt re-establishes Egypt’s presence within the global Modernist canon.
2. Hamnet
By Maggie O’Farrell
In 1580s England, during the Black Plague, a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people.
Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
3. Home Body
By Rupi Kaur
Rupi Kaur constantly embraces growth, and in Home Body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self.
Home Body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.
4. Magnolia Table, Volume 2: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering
By Joanna Gaines
Following the successful launch of her #1 New York Times bestselling cookbook, Magnolia Table, Joanna Gaines gained a deeper commitment to the value of food being shared. This insight inspired Joanna to get back in the kitchen and start from scratch, pushing herself beyond her comfort zone to develop new recipes for her family, and yours, to gather around.
From breakfast to dinner, plus breads, soups, and sides, Magnolia Table, Volume 2 gives readers abundant reasons to gather together. The book is beautifully photographed and filled with dishes you’ll want to bring into your own home.
5. The Guest List
By Lucy Foley
On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every wedding detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed. And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?
6. Promise Me, Dad
By Joe Biden
From President-Elect Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad is his deeply moving memoir about the year that would forever change both a family and a country.
This is a book written not just by the President, but by a father, grandfather, friend, and husband. Promise Me, Dad is a story of how family and friendships sustain us and how hope, purpose, and action can guide us through the pain of personal loss into the light of a new future.
