NBN Book of the Day

In this NBN episode, award-winning and celebrated author Farzana Doctor interviews Hollay Ghadery about her novel, The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press, 2026).

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay here. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.

About Farzana Doctor:

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and Registered Social Worker/Psychotherapist. Her ancestry is Indian, and she was born in Zambia while her family was based there for five years, before immigrating to Canada in 1971. Learn more here
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Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.

Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer (HarperOne, 2026) chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Writer Naomi Kanakia has spent her adult life reading the so-called “great books,” those classic works of literature which are–depending who you ask–either deeply unfashionable, or a time-honored testament to human accomplishment.

With What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026) Kanakia, a devoted lay reader, unpacks popular anxieties surrounding classic writers like Milton, Tolstoy, and Proust. Using the unpretentious approach she has cultivated on her popular Substack, Woman of Letters, Kanakia addresses common reservations about the great books, questions about why we should bother with literature with dated politics, or books exceedingly difficult to read. For plenty of readers, particularly those who came of age in the last decade, the answers may not be clear. Kanakia offers an intriguing reminder to challenge ourselves, to look beyond the walls of the ideology we have constructed for ourselves. (Just don’t ask her about “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes.) “What’s So Great about the Great Books” is out now with Princeton University Press.

Megan Peck Shub (AKA Galley Hag) is a writer, journalist, and a producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. She previously worked on Finding Your Roots with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the PBS history docuseries. Megan’s eclectic slate runs the gamut from literature to pop culture to politics, with a particular focus where those topics intersect.
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Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.

Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant
ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with
sections of India’s vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively
supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen
as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a
new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown over many decades.

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
(Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how and why the movement
became popular among India’s diaspora from the second half of the
twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of
organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating
overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular
functions for diaspora communities.Edward T.G. Anderson argues that
transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this
phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of
diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He
also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on
British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various
minority communities.

Sachin Nikarge has
extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent
foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power
domains.
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