THESE days I don't get enough time to read much fiction as I would like to. The writing of my latest novel set in Morocco, my interfaith and education work, saps a lot of my time. Many hours a week are drained into reading non-fiction essential reading which includes education papers and inspection reports. As I travel fairly regularly I use long plane or train journeys to treat myself to a novel or two and see which one hooks me. Often this has meant that my house is littered with quite a few unread novels. Having said that I have just finished The Dust That Falls from Dreams, the latest novel by a writer friend, Louis De Berniere. I loved reading this story of three families starting from the death of Queen Victoria and going to the end of WW I. The book follows their story as they cope with the effects of war.

At the Kolkata Book Fair this year I picked up an earlier work of Anita Desai. It was interesting to read The Village by the Sea (1982),a novel she has written for young people. About brother and sister Hari and Lila, it focuses on the poverty, hardships and sorrow faced by a small rural community in India.

I was delighted to extend my reading of German literature when I was given two well-known literary masterpieces as presents, Nathan the Wise (1779) and Effie Briest (1896). The play Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is a plea for religious tolerance. All the more important in today's troubled times. Linked to my two other favourite European novels, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the so called 'adultery tragedies,' Effi Briest, a realist novel by Theodor Fontane deals with the topic of 19th-century marriage from a female perspective.

During my recent visit to Palestine, and wanting to read work by Palestinian writers, I bought Sharon and my Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (1988) from a Jerusalem bookshop. Written by Suad Amiry, it gives us a unique insight into life under occupation, full of pathos as well as humour.