Category: Seagull Books

Buy This Book Dangerous Outcast traces how, from the peripheries of precolonial Bengali rural society, prostitutes came to dominate the centrestage in Calcutta, the capital of British India—thanks to the emergence of a new clientele brought forth by the colonial order. While examining the policies the British administration implemented to revamp the profession to suit its… Continue reading Dangerous Outcast | The Prostitute In Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Buy This Book My father is dead, I just killed him. Camille struggles to figure out who she is and where she fits in the world. She is a young lesbian woman coming of age in a coastal, working-class neighbourhood in 1950s France. Her mother holds the family together. Her father, a war veteran, is… Continue reading Camille in October

Buy This Book Bengali writer Riza Rahman’s numerous novels and short stories bring to life the difficult, mostly forgotten lives of Bangladesh’s poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Her novel Letters of Blood is set in the often violent world of prostitution in Bangladesh. Rahman brings great sensitivity and insight to her chronicles of the lives of women… Continue reading Letters of Blood | A Novel

Buy This Book It All Tastes of Farewell is a frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany. As a writer, Brigitte Reimann could not help but tell a compelling story, and that is born out here in her diaries, which are gripping as any novel. She recorded only what mattered: telling… Continue reading It All Tastes of Farewell | Diaries, 1964–1970

Buy This Book Manon Gropius (1916–1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon’s World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the centre of a broken love triangle. The… Continue reading Manon’s World | A Hauntology of a Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel

Buy This Book ‘Blue jewellery’ is private property. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. It is worn like a bracelet around the wrists, on ribs, legs, arms. Blue jewellery is another name for the marks left on women’s bodies, inflicted by the men around them. This novel tells the story of Filiz… Continue reading Blue Jewellery

Buy This Book This acclaimed novel is set during the Lebanese Civil War and offers a rare depiction of women’s experiences amid this sprawling, region-defining conflict. In Alawiya Sobh’s hands, the details of everyday life mix with female voices from across classes, sects, and generations to create an indelible picture of a climate where violence and… Continue reading Maryam | Keeper of Stories

Buy This Book In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan’s Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses. The Afghan journey documented… Continue reading All the Roads Are Open | An Afghan Journey