Welcome back to the Lecker Book Club. Every month I’ll pick a newly released food related book and talk to the author about the process of writing it.

This month: Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman by N.S. Nuseibeh.

Namesake is a collection of essays exploring what it means to be a young, secular Muslim woman today, told through the lens of stories of the author's ancestor, Nusaybah, the only woman warrior to have fought alongside the Prophet.

N. S. Nuseibeh is a British Palestinian writer and researcher, born and raised in East Jerusalem. In Namesake, she weaves her own experiences of anxiety, of racism, of joy, of illness, of cooking in shared houses, of aubergines, with the myths and legends told of her ancestor. All of this makes this a book that I think should be required reading for everyone.

You can find a transcript for this episode at leckerpodcast.com.

Namesake is out now, published by Canongate. Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list.

This month, all the revenue I would normally get from  Patreon, Apple Podcasts and Substack will be donated to mutual aid requests from Gazan people on Operation Olive Branch. If you would like to make your own donation, send me a screenshot and I'll comp you a subscription.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.