Event: Feminist Giant & Strand Present: Asha Thanki & Sadiya Ansari

FEMINIST GIANT and The Strand Book Store’s feminist book club returns in August and I am thrilled to announce that I’ll be conversation with Asha Thanki and Sadiya Ansari, on their latest books A Thousand Times Before and In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and my Grandmother's Secret Life.

Our in-person discussion on August 26 will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

This event is FREE to attend. Register for tickets

Can’t make the event?

Purchase a signed copy of A Thousand Times Before here.

Purchase a signed copy of In Exile here.

See the Strand events page for

About A Thousand Times Before:

A heartrending family saga following three generations of women connected by a fantastic tapestry through which they inherit the experiences of those that lived before them, sweeping readers from Partition-era India to modern day Brooklyn.

Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she’s long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret her family has kept for centuries, one that Ayukta will be the first to share with someone outside their bloodline: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her.

Ayukta invites Nadya into this lineage, carrying her through its past. She relives her grandmother Amla’s life: Once a happy child in Karachi, Amla migrates to Gujarat during Partition, witnessing violence and loss that forever shape her approach to marriage and motherhood. Amla’s daughter, Arni, bears this weight in her own blood in 1974, when gender equity and urban class distinctions divide the community as a bold student movement takes hold. As Ayukta unspools these generations of women—whole decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and revival—she reveals the tapestry’s second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Like all power, both fantastic and societal, this inheritance is more treacherous than it seems.

What would it mean, to impart an impossible burden? To withhold these incredible gifts?

Sweeping, deeply felt and intergenerational, A Thousand Times Before is a debut as poetic as it is propulsive, as healing as it is heartbreaking, as it examines what it means to carry our past with us and to pass it on. Rooted in a tender love story, and spun with a tremendous amount of care, this book is a rare, remarkable feat from an incredible new literary talent.

About In Exile:

In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations? 

Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.

Photo credit: Serena Seshadri

Asha Thanki received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. She is the winner of the 2019 Arkansas International Emerging Writers Prize and fourth prize winner of Zoetrope’s 2020 Short Fiction Competition. A Kundiman fellow, Asha has received a Randall Kenan Scholarship at Sewanee Writers Conference, Fiction Scholarship with Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature.

Photo credit: Lisa Vlasenko

Sadiya Ansari is a Pakistani Canadian journalist based in London. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, VICE, Refinery29, Maclean’s, The Walrus, and the Globe and Mail, among others. She has reported from North America, Asia, and Europe, and her work has changed legislation and won awards. She is co-founder of the Canadian Journalists of Colour, a 2021 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellow, and a 2023–24 Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK, in French, and Italian. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.