Books

An unflinching yet luminously beautiful take on family, race, sex and the treachery of memory. Don’t be fooled by the frangipani beauty of Abeer Hoque’s prose. Its razor-sharp edges can draw blood.

Sandip Roy (author of Don’t Let Him Know)

Always aware of language and its limitations in fully fleshing out a life lived across cultures, Hoque charts a remarkably intercontinental journey of personal discovery while celebrating hard-won lessons of self-acceptance.

A quietly moving memoir.

Kirkus Reviews, Dec. 2016

… an intelligent, riveting, startlingly honest voice. The writing is elegant and remains exhilarating even when the events are dark.

Chika Unigwe (author of On Black Sisters Street)

Sometimes as a reader you thirst for a tale that you don’t know you are missing. Abeer Hoque’s memoir, Olive Witch is one of these. A brave and gorgeous new voice has arrived among us and I am thrilled to welcome her into the fold.

Nayomi Munaweera (author of Island Of A Thousand Mirrors)

… tales of displacement and dislocation span three continents, bringing each to life in vivid, haunting snapshots that weave together into a delicately drawn and fascinating memoir. Not since Michael Ondaatje have I read a writer who so seamlessly marries poetry with prose in their writing with such a deft, bittersweet touch.

Zafar Sobhan (editor of the Dhaka Tribune)

Boy, this is elegant writing: smooth, clean, sharp, but, with just enough wiggle. The writing is wonderfully alive, and drawn with such economy it gives the (false) impression of being easy. It’s not. Abeer Hoque’s natural lyricism is sustained by being contained and framed. She rolls but she controls, and she does it so well.

Aaron Shurin (author of The Skin Of Meaning)

Some gorgeous writing. Spontaneous. Fresh. Fire in the belly fresh.

Andrew Pham (author of The Eaves Of Heaven)

…traverses a wide emotional landscape, juxtaposing perceptions, moods, and events which though they seem disparate, form a compellingly authentic mirror for the fractured world we all share.

Paul S. Flores, Susan Griffin, and Andrew Leland (Judges for the Tanembaum Award in Nonfiction from the San Francisco Foundation)

…seductive, sharp, transformative… Olive Witch will become a compass for others, women who write, but also anyone who travels between many worlds, and many selves.

Nilanjana S Roy (author of The Wildings)

Abeer Hoque has written a memoir that sneaks up on you, and suddenly you are captivated. Here is a story of finding one’s place in a world that insists too strongly on national borders and other lines of division. Here is a story of crossing borders–of rising above burdens of identity, of learning to accept oneself as well as the circumstances of one’s birth. Here is a story of one woman’s journey to self-actualization.

Chinelo Okparanta (author of Under The Udala Trees)

…an encouraging, timely story for the masses, an inspiration to live – authentically, globally, with urgent immediacy.

Terry Hong, Christian Science Monitor

…vividly conveys each setting with its unique joys and heartaches and the complex parts they play in an ever-changing sense of self and home. The father-daughter relationship portrayed here is moving as well in its evolution over the decades.

Pavani Yalamanchili (editor of The Aerogram)

…an uncanny ability to bring particular places to life on the page.

Chaitali Sen, Brooklyn Magazine

Part travelogue, part meditation, Abeer Hoque’s exploration of home and identity, Olive Witch, is beautifully written… Hoque, a talented photographer, has a terrific sense of place and pacing.

Geeta Kothari, Kenyon Review

…a lyrical, evocative, and sharply honest work…one can only imagine the work to come, considering the sheer magnitude of the author’s skill with location, memory, and introspection.

Wendy Wright, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

…a joy to read, even the really painful parts.

Deesha Philyaw, The Rumpus

The book traces Hoque’s multicultural experience through powerful vignettes from her life, written in a prose so delicate and masterful it borders on poetry. I’ve never been so moved by a book. Or inspired.

Sezín Koehler, HuffPost

…an ambitious undertaking, spirited and subtle. Yet for all of Hoque’s impressive artistry, she seeks very recognizable ends: to give us a vivid sense of place as rich as the people who inhabit it and to render the inner lives of those people, to let us feel their passions and their pains–those that mark them and make them sometimes beautiful, sometimes broken, but always always compelling.

Eric LeMay (New Books Network)

This lovingly produced book contains not just stories, it interleaves photographs with text, and the prose is broken by jagged lines of verse. Taken together, it produces an effect of a blinding swirl, of love glimpsed — but never quite found — through the eddies of time… Hoque’s language can make you see anew.

Amrita Dutta (Indian Express)

Prose interleaves poetry interleaves photography. The effect is dazzling. The reader’s pulse quickens in response to these remarkable stories in which eros is not examined so much as inhabited. Characters leave the pages of one story to resurface in another story at some other stage in life. They are lovers who leave, and they return as lovers. 

Mridula Koshi (author of Not Only The Things That Have Happened)

Abeer Hoque gifts her readers three distinct pleasures in this collection of interconnected stories of intertwined lives and interwoven loves: the crystalline clarity of her photography, the quiet elegance of her poetry, and the vivid sensuality of her prose. Together, they bring to life modern Bangladesh and the lives and loves of its people, wherever they live.

Salil Tripathi (author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent)

 Lush and lyrical, raw and unnerving, ‘The Lovers and The Leavers’ is an impressive debut; a sensuous, poignant exploration of the joys, complexities, and consequences of human desire and connectivity in a global age.

Sheba Karim (author of Skunk Girl)

Hoque is one of the most exciting writers working both in and out of the sub-continent and her fiction is made up of that rare mixture: searingly clean passion alloyed with the courage to take risks with form.  

Ruchir Joshi (author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh)

Abeer Hoque’s words sing from every page. In lyrical and playful prose, sometimes in the cadence of bansuri melodies, other times with the bounce of hard rock, these stories speak of love, fierce as a runaway car, soft as a moan. Sexy, cosmopolitan, and loaded with quiet humor.

Mahmud Rahman (author of Killing The Water)

The Lovers and the Leavers is a fine example of stylish storytelling.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose (publishing consultant and columnist, jayabhattacharjirose.com)