Songs at the River's Edge

Part autobiography, part travelogue, part anthropological study, this is an account of a Western woman living in a Muslim Bangladeshi village for 18 months. On an anthropological level, it demonstrates the beginnings of research in someone else's society, on a more general level, it can be read as a novel or a piece of travel writing. The author writes about the friends she made, the characters she met, the rituals she witnessed, about Islam as practised in that village, and about women living in Purdah. She describes trying, as a Western woman, to live the life of the village women.