Whilst it is Partition that drives the book forward, the focus is predominantly on the women. The Guardian review finishes by saying: With its unflinching focus on violence against women, her strong, captivating debut tells a story that is at once firmly rooted in a time and place and yet pressingly relevant to the here and now. Melody Razak tells this story in Moth, her remarkable debut novel. A pastry chef and café owner, she was inspired to go for an MFA in her forties after listening to elderly survivors recount their experiences on a radio program, Partition Voices, (ah, BBC Radio 4 . . .) “It wasn’t just about the political and geographical rupture in India,”she said in an interview for the Telegraph of India, “It was ruptures between families, between friends, between people because there was so much love there. And that was kind of ripped apart.” It was a need to write about something political, intimate and about women that led Razak to the trauma of Indian Partition in 1947. Listening to the radio one night in her cafe, she heard a show called Partition Voices –– interviews of elderly survivors and their experiences of living through the Partition of India. She was moved. “It wasn’t just about the political and geographical rupture in India. It was ruptures between families, between friends, between people because there was so much love there. And that was kind of ripped apart,” she said. I discovered The Moth phenomenon, not in its original format or the podcast, but as this book. It happened through complete serendipity in a Dublin bookshop a year ago - the type of real-life serendipity which algorithms make so hard to come by online. Somehow, it called out to me, and I'm glad I listened to my gut and bought the book, as it was honestly one of the few life-altering books in my life. Plus, it led me to discover the wonderful podcast.

Learn to write a sciku – In this video, you’ll meet some of Isabel’s favourite moths, record notes using a special template, and learn how to turn these notes into a science haiku or ‘sciku’. Devastating, heartbreaking and a hard read this was. The violence between humans, especially towards the weaks, the appaling misogynistic views on women with their housewives duties, the disgusting act of child marriages that was so prominent, the unfairness of caste system, there are so many themes that were so hard to discussed yet this book brought all of this to the light. All i can say this was such a difficult to read for how graphic some of the scenes are, for how it gets me to actually look at this and see how horrible they are. British and Irish moths: an illustrated guide to selected difficult species. Martin Townsend, Jon Clifton & Brian Goodey, 2010. Information and photographs of 72 difficult to identify macro-moths, which often require close examination or genitalia determination. Butterfly Conservation.That being said, I appreciated Razak’s commentary on religion, nationalism, colonialism, fascism, feminism, classism, etc. As I now understand, this period, the Partition Era, and India's Independence were wrought with political and social upheaval. To Razak’s credit, I felt that with her debut novel she attempted to speak on the multiplicity of issues that were occurring during this period, through the experience of this fictional family. I believe this story was meant to elicit relatability and emotionality to the circumstances via a domestic setting. The first collection from celebrated storytelling phenomenon The Moth presents fifty spellbinding, soul-bearing stories selected from their extensive archive.

Alma: the beating heart of the novel. We meet her as a precocious 14-year old who becomes entangled with the chaos of Partition with devastating consequences My only other gripe is that I had heard at least a third of the stories already, on The Moth podcast. Some of them I reread and enjoyed all over again, but others I skipped, in favor of discovering a new story. This was of course unavoidable--based on how the stories were collected in the first place--but as a reader and a Moth listener, I was slightly put off. Ma and Bappu are liberal intellectuals teaching at the local university. Their fourteen year-old daughter – precocious, headstrong Alma– is soon to be married: Alma is mostly interested in the wedding shoes and in spinning wild stories for her beloved younger sister Roop, a restless child obsessed with death. Of the quarter million species of beetles, some adults damage books by eating paper and binding materials themselves. However, their larvae do the most damage. Typically eggs are laid on the book's edges and spine. Upon hatching, they bore into, and sometimes even through, the book. [3] Drugstore beetle Woodboring beetles [ edit ]

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Her younger sister Roop is a free spirited individual with a very quirky personality. Roop sees the world very differently from others in her family. She fears nothing, has a peculiar relationship with death and, as the story progresses, she becomes very important to the family’s survival.