The younger daughter Roop is something of a psychopath in the making - prone to pulling the wings of insects or otherwise torturing them and to an obsession with blood and death. I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists, although I had been aware of it as it featured on the influential Observer Best Debut Novelists of the Year feature for 2021 alongside such other successful and impressive books as “Little Scratch” (2021 Desmond Elliott Prize shortlist), “Open Water” (2021 Desmond Elliott Prize longlist, Costa First Novel Award winner), “Lear Wife” and “Assembly” (also on the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize and for me the best novel of 2021). Banish moth myths – Brainstorm what your class already knows about moths, then watch my short film, which busts some moth myths! Ma & Bappu do their best to shield Roop and Alma from the horrors beyond their walls, but the sounds infiltrate their every thought. As the days pass their freedom becomes more curtailed and their future takes on a very different hue. To protect their family they take a few different measures but, with the city and the country in complete turmoil, the family is ultimately affected in the most unimaginable way and their peaceful life is destroyed forever.

Moth by Melody Razak | Review by Mairéad Hearne Moth by Melody Razak | Review by Mairéad Hearne

While friends turned on friends, neighbors vilifying each other, MOTH by Melody Razak is not the big picture of what was happening everywhere but a deeper insight into one family particularly which impressed in forging a personal connection with the characters and becoming one with the family. All this shown via the tribulations faced by an upper class brahmin family in Delhi and their close Muslim friends and associates.. The litany of names starts off as a 5-minute bulletin. By the time it comes around to the first week of November there will be 1400 daily messages of girls lost and found, using up to 3 hours of airtime."Summary: This book explains a science concept of natural selection and how animals evolve. It shows this in a way that readers can visualize the change that animals, or in this case moths, go through to adapt to the environment. The book at first hides the moth, and then it gets visible when the environment starts to change, which causes the moth to adapt. Their two daughters are Alma – fourteen years old, prone to wearing a red apple clip. Much of the early part of the book is implicitly told from her viewpoint, giving it something of a young adult feel initially. Due to concerns for the safety of unmarried girls, Daddee Ma arranges an overly hasty marriage for her, including clumsily faking her astrological chart. Alma herself is somewhat obsessed with the world of Djinn’s and gods and of legends and transfers some of this to imagined visions of her promised husband. 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

isabel thomas » MOTH – an evolution story

Alma is the daughter of two professors, coming from an educated upper class family, you'd expect her fate to be reaching for the stars. Instead, the stars are literally dictating her future. When her horoscope predicts ill, her well-intentioned grandmother lies to get her a good marriage match. This sets off a series of events that tears her family apart. Set in the time of Partition and Indian Independence, we get a deep dive into the turmoil of the time, especially the impact on women's rights. Sexual assault, rape, violence, sexism, xenophobia, racism, gore, animal violence, incest, explicit sexual scenes. I know little of this moment in history. However, Moth has inspired me to learn more. This book gives the reader emotion and despair from one family’s point of view in a very impactful way. An essential guide to the smaller or 'Micro' lepidoptera of Britain, over 1500 high quality plates and photos, bringing together these previously difficult insects together in one handy volume for the first time.

Field guide to the moths of Great Britain and Ireland. Paul Waring & Martin Townsend, 2009. Illustrations of all macro-moths in natural resting postures plus detailed field notes. British Wildlife Publishing.

Moth by Melody Razak | Goodreads Moth by Melody Razak | Goodreads

Moth was my final book, of 10, from the Desmond Elliott long list. This has been an excellent list of debut novels that I have really enjoyed working my way through over the last few weeks. This companion guide to the "Field Guide" is a handy, ring-bound and condensed format ideal for taking out in the field or comparing live specimens to the plates. Roop: Alma’s younger sister. Obsessed with death, she is a fierce, funny and rather wild child trying to make sense of the destruction that has befallen her familyIncludes details on behaviour, eggs and larvae, status, geographical range and preferred habits, along with a section dealing with the ‘rarest of the rare’ - extinct species or very rare immigrants. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels, and is quite an impressive debut, mostly set in Delhi at the time of the partition that created independent India and Pakistan. The book is full of memorable characters. Alma’s sister, Roop, is memorable for perhaps the wrong reasons: a very young girl who shows all the signs of being some kind of psychopath! But the rest of the family, including servants, is brought to life very vividly as are the events of Partition.