Loss and life are the themes that weave through this tale of three generations of Muslim women living in suburban South Africa, originally published in 2011.

Khadeejah is a hard-working and stubborn first-generation Indian woman who longs for her beloved homeland and often questions what she is doing on the tip of Africa. At 37, her daughter Summaya is struggling to reconcile her South African and Indian identities, while Summaya’s own daughter, eleven-year-old Aneesa, is a girl who has some difficult questions of her own. Is her mother lying to her about her father’s death? Why won’t she tell her what really happened? Gradually, the past merges with the present as the novel meanders through their lives, uncovering the secrets people keep, the words they swallow, and the emotions they elect to mute.

For this family, faintly detectable through the sharp spicy aromas that find their way out of Khadeejah’s kitchen, the scent of tragedy is always threatening. Eventually, it will bring this family together. If not, it will tear them apart.

Akbar Manzil was once the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast near Durban. Nearly a century later, when Sana and her father move to the house, the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, it is in near-ruins, crumbling, shabby and dark. This is a place where people come to forget. Or to be forgotten.

Full of questions about her new home, Sana is drawn to the deserted and eerie east wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects – and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades. Soon, Sana begins to discover the tangled, troubling history of the house, awakening the memories of the house itself and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone – living and dead – at Akbar Manzil.

Sublime, heart-wrenching and lyrically stunning, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil is a haunting love story and a mystery, all intertwined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.

How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo and Other Strange and Wonderful Stories is part memoir, part travelogue and part love letter. Shubnum Khan takes the reader on a journey around the world. Whether it is teaching children in a remote village in the Himalayas, attending a writers’ residency where the movie The Blair Witch Project was shot, getting pulled out of the ocean in Turkey or becoming a bride on a rooftop in Shanghai, Shubnum is quirky, moving and vulnerable in what she shares.

Shubnum offers an introspective reflection on what it means to be a woman, particularly a single Muslim woman in South Africa, trying to find herself in a modern world. The stories are drawn from her life journey, which has been full of unexpected twists and turns, and are interspersed with reflections on culture and religion as well as musings on family, relationships and love.

The Mindy Project meets Bridget Jones’s Diary with a side of Keeping Up With The Kandasamys, this is a book about holding onto hope and a reminder that once ‘you step off the edge, anything can happen’.

A sequence of meditative and minimalist poems, accompanied by ink drawings by Shubnum Khan.