Zoya Merchant

In many Islamic cultures, sex is rarely discussed, but when it is — whether in the domestic sphere or at madrassa — it’s usually understood as something permissible only within marriage. The Moroccan Canadian journalist Sheima Benembarek takes a more expansive approach to the topic with her first book. Halal Sex explores how six people (the term “womxn” appears in the subtitle but nowhere else) negotiate the tension between their families’ conservative expectations and their own expressions of…

This beautiful memoir opens with a heartbreaking portrait of the ­author’s mother, Sabina. On her deathbed in New London, Connecticut, Sabina offered “an unexpected glimpse” into her early life with her twin, Basia, and their ordeals during the Second World War. “She knew she didn’t have much time left,” Isa Milman writes of her mother, who spoke with a “voice that took on a rushing urgency.” Milman sat in the hospital room “with pen and…