Feminist Giant & Strand Present: Asha Thanki & Sadiya Ansari

Join us for an author discussion with acclaimed writers Asha Thanki and Sadiya Ansari, on their latest books A Thousand Times Before and In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and my Grandmother's Secret Life. Joining Asha and Sadiya in conversation is author and founder of Feminist Giant Mona Eltahawy. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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Attendees are welcome to wear a mask if they choose. If you do not have a mask and would like one, The Strand will provide masks at the door.

Please note this is subject to change any time before or during the event per the author’s request.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by August 12 to request.

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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.

Feminist Giant is a free, reader-supported newsletter that provides weekly essays by Mona Eltahawy and bi-weekly Global Roundups of feminist resistance curated by contributor Samiha Hossain.

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.

Mona Eltahawy is founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant. She is a public speaker on global feminism and is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolu­tion (2015), which targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa, and The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019), which took her disruption to patriarchy worldwide.

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