In store now! Consumed: A Sister’s Story, by Arifa Akbar
We are proud to be Champion Consumed, nominated for this year’s Jhalak Prize! First awarded in March 2017, the @jhalakprize and its new sister award Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize founded in 2020, seek to celebrate books by British/British resident BAME writers, supported by @book_tokens
This astonishing debut from The Guardian’s theatre critic Arifa Akbar is both an emotionally sincere memoir of grief, loss, and the redemptive power of reconstructing sadness as art, as well as a complex exploration of sisterhood, immigration, and medical history. Truly unique, Akbar’s prose has a clarity and luminosity that carries the reader through her relationship with her challenging, charming, gifted sister, Fauzia. Fauzia’s art punctuates the prose, whilst her sister’s commentary provides an emotionally resonant narrative through line.
Recalling the heartbreaking clarity of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and the socio-historical and cultural confluences of Jessica Au and Arundhati Roy, Consumed is a subtly challenging, quietly poignant, but ultimately hopeful work. We’re incredibly proud to be championing such a daring, trailblazing debut novel. Consumed is the must read memoir of the year!
Follow Arifa Akbar on Twitter @Arifa_Akbar and keep up with news from Sceptre here @SceptreBooks.
Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Consumed: A Sister’s Story by Arifa Akbar
Hardback £16.99
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When Arifa Akbar discovered that her sister had fallen seriously ill, she assumed there would be a brief spell in hospital and then she'd be home. This was not to be.
It was not until the day before she died that the family discovered she was suffering from tuberculosis. Consumed is a story of sisterhood, grief, the redemptive power of art and the strange mythologies that surround tuberculosis. It takes us from Keats's deathbed and the tubercular women of opera to the resurgence of TB in modern Britain today.
Arifa travels to Rome to haunt the places Keats and her sister had explored, to her grandparent's house in Pakistan, to her sister's bedside at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead and back to a London of the seventies when her family first arrived, poor, homeless and hungry. Consumed is an eloquent and moving excavation of a family's secrets and a sister's detective story to understand her sibling.
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
We are open:
Monday - Saturday
10am - 5.30 pm
We are back open six days a week, with the whole store open for browsing. We will still of course be taking customer orders and you will still be able to buy food and cleaning products online through our online store.
We are able to be open 6 days a week again because of your consideration and care whilst in the shop. Though things are opening up, covid cases are still high and a lot of our staff have only received one jab. So we are asking customers to continue to leave that extra space, sanitise their hands and pull on their mask. We really appreciate it.
