Synopsis "Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin’s first major work in exile, My Girlhood is a sensitive retelling of her growing up as part of an extended family in Bangladesh and erstwhile East Pakistan. The pictures emerge like flashes from a colourful kaleidoscope, creating a brilliant image as the author moves back and forth between her own life and that of a fledgling nation. A child like innocence and freshness pervades her sharp observations of Bangladeshi society with its class discriminations and bias, its blatant gender disparities and growing religious orthodoxy and intolerance. Her account is as much a personal record as it is a chronicle of political events in the life of nation. Nasrin’s writing, as she herself, remains rooted in her native land, springing from the very soil and air of Bangladesh, and it is this knowledge of her rootedness, perhaps, that impels her to look back to the first 13-14 years of her life in Mymensingh."