Mahvesh Murad

Dec 2, 2024 | reactormag.com | Mahvesh Murad

The City and Its Uncertain Walls was originally published as a novella in 1980, but Japanese writer Haruki Murakami wasn’t happy with how much (or little) he was able to explore in it. He went on to write many other books, using some of the ideas in the novella for them, but (as per his own afterword in his novel), never quite feeling as if he’d settled that story fully.

Oct 17, 2024 | reactormag.com | Mahvesh Murad

At a premier girl’s school in Kuala Lumpur,  young girls suddenly start to scream. It begins with one teenager at St Bernadette’s, and what follows is a wave of mass hysteria, with seventeen young girls breaking into blood curdling, uncontrollable screams within a single day. They later report seeing something that triggered them, but no one seems to know what they’ve seen, or why this is happening.

Sep 19, 2024 | reactormag.com | Mahvesh Murad

Rachel Harrison’s So Thirsty focuses on a young woman called Sloane, who has let things happen to her for a really long time. Her 36th birthday is around the corner, and her husband has surprised her with a weekend away (not with him, because he’s a serial cheater and Sloane knows that he probably just wants her out of his way), but with her childhood best friend Naomi. Naomi’s life is a “wild, glamorous adventure,” and she is everything Sloane is not—unpredictable, fun, free.

Aug 28, 2024 | reactormag.com | Mahvesh Murad

Whether you’re a fan of Shakespeare or not, whether you’ve read Macbeth in school or not, you’ll probably have heard of Lady Macbeth, well known as one of Shakespeare’s most formidable villains. Wife to the titular Macbeth in the play, she is his partner in crime, his intellectual equal and the aggressive driving force in his life, his rise and eventual fall.

Aug 22, 2024 | reactormag.com | Mahvesh Murad

Mateo Askaripour’s second novel This Great Hemisphere is set 500 years into our future, in what is now known as the Northwestern Hemisphere, a part of the world where human society has survived massive climate change yet continues to exits in a capitalist, bigoted system that isn’t at all an improvement on what we currently know. The ecology is a shadow of what it once was, but there is a great deal of fancy technology that allows humans to maintain class and race divisions.