Full Circle Book Club
hosted by Eleonora Balsano

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai

Culture | Thurs 17th Sept | 7:00-8:30 pm

Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.

*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiran Desai is an Indian writer and the bestselling author of three novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is her latest work of fiction, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The judges described the novel as an epic of love and family, spanning generations and countries, that is the most "ambitious and accomplished" work by Desai. Born in India, she moved to the US when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 most influential global Indian women.

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	ACCESS
Bar open with snacks	Small (~10)	Available on request

Book Launch / Sat 19th Sept / 5-7 pm

As a Palestinian woman who grew up in Israel, Eva Dalak's personal story is woven with the collective wounds of conflict, displacement, and inherited pain. Her memoir of transformation, Dancing in the Dark, is an exceptional, powerful journey through loss, identity and the reclamation of light in the face of darkness.

Eva does not just share a testimony of survival, but a profound exploration of healing. As she even lost her vision for two years, she had to navigate physical blindness alongside the unseen landscapes of trauma, belonging and ancestral memory. With honesty and poetic grace, she traces her path from disorientation to clarity, from fragmentation to wholeness.

She also introduces her Peace Activation framework, through which she weaves trauma-informed practices, intergenerational dialogue and embodied resilience into a new way forward - for individuals as well as for communities and nations caught in cycles of violence.

What if the reason we struggle to create lasting peace isn't what we think? What if our most well-crafted peace agreements fail not because we lack good intentions, but because we're missing something fundamental? Come hear Eva's powerful testimony of awakening, begin to see with new eyes and discover how to activate peace as a lived experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eva Dalak is an Israeli Palestinian peacebuilder and peace activator with over 25 years of experience in conflict transformation. She is the founder of Peace Activation and co-founder of One Whole Peace, both soul-centred peace movements in Palestine and Israel bringing citizens of different faiths together in conflict transformation. She is passionate about activating peace, promoting gender equality, interfaith dialogue, and empowering communities to build peace from within. As a skilled conflict transformation facilitator, peacebuilding trainer, and gender advisor, Eva has amassed experience in over 22 countries in conflict zones across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. She is committed to promoting individual soul-centred leadership and radical responsibility through innovative and entrepreneurial initiatives. 

GOODREADS

Dancing in the Dark, How I found my True Vision for Peace (2025). 

Book Launch / Wed 23rd Sept / 6pm - 8pm

*Doors open at 5.30pm*

*Hosted event

Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi by Pierre Hazan is a deeply personal yet political narrative tracing two centuries of Jewish-Arab coexistence through the story of the author's own family.

Writing as a member of the last generation of Jews born in Arab lands, Hazan traces this history through four figures: his ancestor Moshe, a rabbi who journeyed from Jerusalem to Europe and back before siding with the Arab world against European colonial powers; his great-uncle Daoud, a revolutionary and co-founder of Egypt's first independence party who was sentenced to death by the British yet remained a Zionist; his maternal grandfather Maurice, whose Arab, Jewish, and British identities collided as the Middle East grew turbulent in the 1940s; and his father, Elie, who tried to delay an irreversible exile after the 1956 Suez Crisis, as Jews across the Arab world were uprooted following the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Weaving family history with broader historical currents, the book is both an elegy for a largely vanished world of Jewish-Arab coexistence and a fragile note of hope that such coexistence might be reimagined.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pierre Hazan is the former Diplomatic Correspondent for Libération (Paris) and Le Temps (Geneva), specializing in humanitarian action and international justice, and has closely observed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Middle East. A Fellow at Harvard Law School (2005) and the United States Institute of Peace (2006), he has authored several books, including Justice in a Time of War and Judging War, Judging History (Stanford University Press, 2010), and served as a U.N. expert on cultural rights in 2013.

Full Circle Book Club
hosted by Eleonora Balsano

The Nights Are Quiet in Teheran
by Shida Bazyar

Culture | Thurs 15th Oct | 7:00-8:30 pm

Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.

*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shida Bazyar studied writing in Germany, and worked in youth education for many years. Born in 1988, she is the author of the novels The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and Sisters in Arms. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran has won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize. The English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	ACCESS
Bar open with snacks	Small (~12)	Available on request

Full Circle Book Club
hosted by Eleonora Balsano

She Who Remains
by Rene Karabash

Culture | Thurs 19th Nov | 7:00-8:30 pm

Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.

*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. She has won multiple awards for her work, including several Best Actress awards for her role in the film Godless. Her debut novel, She Who Remains, was awarded the 2019 Elias Canetti Prize, Bulgaria’s most prestigious literary award. It has been translated into over a dozen languages, and a film, adapted by the author, is set to be released in 2026. The English language edition was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Karabash is also the author of the collection Omar’s Letters to His Future Wife, and is working on her second novel.

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	ACCESS
Bar open with snacks	Small (~12)	Available on request

FESTIVAL OF IDEAS 2026

"CONNECTION"

Fri 20th - Sat 21st - Sun 22nd Nov

You already know us, you know what we do, and that by coming YOU make this a great event! 

Get your WEEKEND PASS today and treat yourself for the entire weekend!

Full Circle Book Club
hosted by Eleonora Balsano

Beginning Middle End
by Valeria Luiselli

Culture | Thurs 10th Dec | 7:00-8:30 pm

Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.

*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. She is an acclaimed award-winning author and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College Her previous novel, Lost Children Archive, was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages. 

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ADDITIONAL INFO 

FOOD & DRINK	EVENT SIZE	ACCESS
Bar open with snacks	Small (~10-15)	Available on request