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- 150 Most Popular Fiction Books That Are A Must-Read
150 Most Popular Fiction Books That Are A Must-Read
Good fiction holds the power to change the reader’s mood, opinion, and perspective. We’ve put together a comprehensive list of our best-loved backlist fiction books, in the hope that some of these will be able to do just that for you!
This is the tale of Reddumone, or Two-Face, a Lankan spy. It is also the tale of Rama of Ayodhya.
Clever, loyal and powerful, Reddumone is the perfect spy. Noble, strong, and brave, Rama is the quintessential king. Their paths cross often, over several decades and across the length of the Indian subcontinent. Against a background of civil wars and murderous coups, the two form a strange, knotty friendship. It is a bond marked by mutual respect, divided by loyalty, and complicated by a seemingly impossible ideal: dharma. The novel follows Rama’s moral arc: from an unyielding adherence to dharma to a more nuanced understanding of righteousness. Reddumone too follows a similar curve, balancing loyalty and love as he finds his own moral centre. In this self-assured and complex debut, M.R. Sharan blends mythology with philosophy and spiritual yearning with political machinations. Blue is, ultimately, a love song to Rama, the man, and the idea of him. It will forever change the way you read the Ramayana.
Buddha was as mortal as you and I, yet he attained enlightenment and was raised to the rank of an immortal. The miracle is that he got there following a heart as human as yours and mine, and just as vulnerable.’ – from the Author’s Note Bestselling author Deepak Chopra brings the Buddha back to life in this gripping novel of the young prince who abandoned his inheritance to discover his true calling. This iconic journey changed the world forever, and the truths revealed continue to influence every corner of the globe today. A young man in line for the throne is trapped in his father’s kingdom and yearns for the outside world. Betrayed by those closest to him, Siddhartha abandons his palace and princely title. Alone and face-to-face with his demons, he becomes a wandering monk and embarks on a spiritual fast that carries him to the brink of death. Ultimately recognizing his inability to conquer his body and mind by sheer will, Siddhartha transcends his physical pain and achieves enlightenment.
A stunning literary debut critic has likened to Richard Wright’s Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society. The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as a driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society. Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is a narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation – and a startling, provocative debut.
When her grandmother learned of Ashima’s pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at the prospect of naming the family’s first sahib. And so Ashima and Ashoke have agreed to put off the decision of what to name the baby until a letter comes…’ For now, the label on his hospital cot reads simply ‘Baby Boy Ganguli’. But as time passes and still no letter arrives from India, American bureaucracy takes over and demands that ‘baby boy Ganguli’ be given a name. In a panic, his father decides to nickname him ‘Gogol’ – after his favorite writer. Brought up as an Indian in suburban America, Gogol Ganguli soon finds himself itching to cast off his awkward name, just as he longs to leave behind the inherited values of his Bengali parents. And so he sets off on his own path through life, a path strewn with conflicting loyalties, love, and loss.
The tamer of Putana, the god-child, the redeemer of the world, the Slayer of Kamsa, dances with abandon amidst his own As we move into the second instalment of Ashok K. Banker s Krishna tales, the prophesied Slayer of Kamsa has been born and smuggled out of Mathura in the dead of the night. Kamsa finds that his nephew has escaped and flies into a demoniac rage. Meanwhile, his evil ally Jarasandha of Magadha arrives in Mathura with his coterie of powerful supporters to ensure that Kamsa stays loyal to him. But Kamsa is not to be crushed. With the help of Putana, a powerful demoness living incognito among humans, he slowly regains his strength and acquires new powers. In Book 2 of the Krishna Coriolis series, Ashok K. Banker retells the legendary exploits of the Preserver in his most lovable avatar, bringing alive the majesty and splendor of ancient India and the high drama of its epics.
Abdul Khaleq teaches at a rural college nearing collapse in newly independent Bangladesh. When a writer friend asks him to chronicle his childhood, Abdul retreats to an enchanting world in the suburbs of Calcutta. He remembers the girl who spoke to fish and birds, the girl he first loved. He also recalls the stream of visitors who came to his parents’ door in those days, some bearing want, some malice, and others, generosity and wisdom. He plummets into despondency when memories return him to a time when Hindu-Muslim tensions in undivided Bengal eclipsed his innocence. Abdul’s nostalgia enrages his wife Rekha who resents his lack of ambition and aloofness. Prodded by the village physician Doctor Narhari, the couple embarks on a boat ride that forces them to confront their discord and desires, and plumb the roots of Abdul’s alienation. Published first in 1977, Mahmudul Haque’s cult novel, Black Ice, probes with utmost sensitivity the invisible scars bequeathed to the inheritors of the losses of Partition.
- The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea. It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh’s new novel. In the Sundarbans, the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks, and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator.
Childhood, as Ravi remembers it, was a seemingly endless period of pain and abuse suffered at the hands of his father. Now, despite being a twenty-something living in a different city, memories of those days – the rage, the beatings, and the hatred – continue to torment him. Until the day he is summoned to his dying father’s bedside . . .A story of one man’s journey from hatred towards empathy, Parricide is about the choices we make and the price we must pay for even partial resolutions.
- Idris by Anita Nair
The year is 1659. Idris, a Somalian trader, is in Kerala to attend the Mamangam festivities. By a strange twist of fate, he meets his nine-year-old son whose existence he had been unaware of. In an attempt to keep his son close to him, Idris embarks with him on a voyage that ends in the diamond mines of Golconda. Packed with passion, adventure, and fascinating aspects of life in the seventeenth century in southern India, Idris is a page-turner that will intrigue and excite readers everywhere.
The story of Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha, leaving the palace to start his spiritual journey and attain enlightenment has been told innumerable times over the centuries. And yet, have we never wondered why his young wife, Yashodhara, still recovering from the birth of their son nine days ago, sleeps soundly as her husband, the over-protected prince departs, leaving behind his family and wealth and kingdom? In Yashodhara, the gaps of history are imagined with fullness and fierceness: Who was the young girl, and what shaped her worldview? When she married Siddhartha at the age of sixteen, did she know her conjugal life would soon change drastically? The Yashodhara we meet in Volga’s feminist novel is quick-witted, compassionate, and wants to pave a way for women to partake in spiritual learning as equals of men.
Swati believes Akanksha, Ajay’s colleague, hovers as a ‘third’ between them. Ajay is certain his faithfulness is beyond question, yet it has upended his relationship with Swati. With his marriage at risk, Ajay decides to go for a trek in Ladakh, only to be stranded, as the region experiences the worst floods ever to consume it. Forced to seek shelter in a remote monastery in the Hemis Sanctuary, he meets its charismatic abbot, a man unlike any other, and Anna, a young scholar, who is in search of a lost manuscript on the ‘missing years of Jesus. Gradually, the uncertainty over Ajay’s marriage turns into an exploration of love and sexuality, against an unusual backdrop of spiritual practices as he realizes that passionate restraint can sometimes produce greater fulfillment than consummation. Evocative, soulful, and reflective all at once, Hemis is a powerful reminder that nothing else defines us more than our capacity to love.
Rajkumar is only another boy, helping on a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace when the British force the Burmese King, Queen, and all the Court into exile. He is rescued by the far-seeing Chinese merchant, and with him builds up a logging business in upper Burma. But haunted by his vision of the Royal Family, he journeys to the obscure town in India where they have been exiled. The story follows the fortunes – rubber estates in Malaya, businesses in Singapore, estates in Burma – which Rajkumar, with his Chinese, British and Burmese relations, friends and associates, builds up – from 1870 through the Second World War to the scattering of the extended family to New York and Thailand, London and Hong Kong in the post-war years.
Paar — ‘mirage’ country, where it is often impossible to draw the line between reality and illusion — has been suffering from a decade-long drought. Jasoda is one of the last to leave this ‘arse-end of the world’ with her children and mother-in-law. Since her husband claims he has important work to do for the local prince, Jasoda must make the journey to the city by the sea on her own. Meanwhile, after years of anonymity, Paar seems poised to take off. Will Jasoda return home with her children? Or stay in the city that’s become home for her children? It’s taken for granted that epic journeys and epics were possible only during the time of the Mahabharata, the Odyssey, or The Iliad. Even more to the point, the heroes of the epics had to, perforce, be men. The eponymous Jasoda of the novel is about to prove how wrong the assumptions are. Kiran Nagarkar’s trenchant narrative traces the journey of a woman of steely resolve and gumption, making her way through an India that is patriarchal, feudal, seldom in the news, and weighed down by dehumanizing poverty.
A Night in London chronicles the diverse and often-conflicting emotional, ideological, and political aspirations of an entire generation of Indian students in Europe. The novella sheds light on the dynamics of late imperial culture-English working-class politics, anti-colonial sentiment, and race relations-like no other sustained narrative by an expatriate Indian author of the same period. Long considered a landmark in twentieth-century Urdu fiction, A Night in London is being made available in English for the first time in a translation by Bilal Hashmi. The volume also features an introduction by Carlo Coppola, a noted scholar, and critic of Urdu literature.
A sensitive portrayal of the hopes and fears,triumphs and defeats experienced by the women of the Tagorehousehold. in a sprawling novel that spans a unique phase in the history of Bengal and India, Aruna Chakravarti provides a fascinating account of how the Tagore women influenced and were in turn influenced by their illustrious male counterparts, the times they lived in and the family they belonged to. Jorasanko mirrors the hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats that the women of the Tagore household experienced in their intricate interpersonal relationships, as well as the adjustments they were continually called upon to make as daughters and daughters-in-law of one of the most eminent families of the land. ‘In her meticulously researched novel, Aruna Chakravarti has successfully re-created for the reader the world inside the Tagore home, at once glittering and fascinating, but also dark and challenging. The women of the Tagore family who are at the heart of this novel are complex beings who will raise many questions in the modern reader regarding the role of women in today’s society’ – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Palace of Illusions and One Amazing Thing.
- Toke by Jugal Mody
So Lord Vishnu showed up one morning when I was really stoned and asked me to save the world from turning undead. How did I save the world? I didn’t. We did. And while saving the world, I got to forcefully kiss the girl of my dreams. Many times. My best friends got to smoke a lot of good shit. A lot more than they would have otherwise smoked in that much time. They also got to crash an airplane into a slum outside Santacruz airport. But don’t worry, there were only zombies around when that happened. We were joined in our quest by two Japanese girls who can kill people with their pinkies, one of whom forcefully kissed Danny. Yes, there was a lot of non-consensual kissing in this adventure. With tongue. Hi. I’m Nikhil. This is my story. And I swear I have a T-shirt to prove it.
Jeevan Sharma, an Indian immigrant in the US and a former taxi driver, manages his Pakistani landlord Shabbir Ahmad’s accounts in return for rent-free accommodation. The quiet rhythm of his days in Baltimore is punctuated only by interactions with his neighbours on 26th Street: Miss Lucy, an old black lady who makes him pancakes; Henry, a World War II veteran, and his dog Oscar; and Matthew and Kay, a married couple in their late twenties, who are negotiating a difficult relationship. Then, two things happen to throw his life into disarray: the sudden arrival of Sunita, a young woman who has walked away from a cheating husband, and the decision by the City of Baltimore to demolish the block that they live in. Will Jeevan be able to protect his old and infirm friends from the power of the City and Shabbir’s greed? Can his settled solitude withstand the possibility of happiness with someone else? This Place is a novel about a group of people for whom neighbourhood means more than simply living next to each other. It is a book about accepting and fighting against impermanence. It is also a book about South Asians in America at the end of the twentieth century.
As youngsters in Bulbul Kothi, Allahabad, Rekha, and Amina shared much: dolls, gossip, bits of adult-only knowledge. Perhaps nothing would have changed if Rekha’s affair with Danish-Bhai had not ended in bitterness and heartbreak. Now, after what seems like an eternity, they are back in each other’s lives, and they long to put the past to rest … but can they? The age of cell phones, communal tension, and terrorism exhumes the secrets they buried, revealing the brutal truth about what they once considered a simpler time. Neelum Saran Gour’s loving narrative traces the journey of two friends in their search for closure and for a place ‘where things are slow to change, where one could still find someone unchanged’ … for one thing is clear: their lives are now irrevocably altered.
A muscular, incisive, and deeply sardonic comment on twenty-first century India, The Story of My Assassins is a multilayered novel that skilfully slashes through thesubcontinent’s dubious spiritual serenity to lay bare every crippling divide of language, wealth and class. Trawling life and death in the dark underside, it inquires into the inexorable codes of power and wealth that propel societies. A triumph of disparate voices, unbearable realities, and impossible conundrums, this is a book that will forever change the way we look at theworld around us.
It’s true what they say – it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us.’ From a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, a family finds itself making a transition in many ways. The narrator, a sensitive young man, is numbed by the swirl around him. All he can do is flee every day to an old-world cafe, where he seeks solace from an oracular waiter. As members of the family realign their equations and desires, new strands are knotted, others come apart, and conflict brews dangerously in the background. Masterfully translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Ghachar Ghochar is a suspenseful, playful, and ultimately menacing story about the shifting consequences of success.
Zairos is a dissolute young landowner’s son living in the town of Dahanu, just outside Bombay, when his life of careless luxury is brought up short by a mysterious death: the sudden suicide of Ganpat, a tribal worker on his family’s estate. Soon he has fallen in love with Ganpat’s daughter, Kusum, and finds himself defying taboos with their relationship. At the same time, his grandfather, Shapur, reveals to him the story of their family and of the land that Zairos stands to inherit. Dahanu Road brilliantly reveals the history of the relationship between the landowning Irani clan and the Warlis, local tribal people like Ganpat and Kusum who work the land for the Iranis. As Zairos’ connection with Kusum deepens, he is drawn further into the mystery of Shapur’s relationship with Ganpat and the other Warlis. Violence and hatred echo through history, and Zairos learns the terrible truth his grandfather has spent a lifetime hiding. With its inimitable mix of earthy humour and searing tragedy, this is Anosh Irani’s most ambitious novel yet.
A] story which will stay with you a long, long time -The Hindu ‘Chakravarti’s India is the real India’ – India Today ‘Reminiscent of Salinger’ – Outlook ‘[Chakravarti’s] telling is straight, frank and honest. It makes no apologies’ – Tehelka In an elite boarding school in Rajasthan, fifteen-year old Barun Ray, aka Brandy, lover of canned fish and beefsteak, hater of Kipling, worshipper of Michael Caine and Mick Jagger, meets his soul mates – Fish, ‘king’ swimmer with a domineering, Muslim-hating father; PT Shoe, a princeling who wants to run away to America and marry a ‘gora’ chick; and Porridge, a cereal-loving jester caught between warring churches at home. Together, the four boys set about characteristically irreverent, sometimes hilarious rebellions against their regimental fishbowl existence at a brown-sahib institution in a turbulent, changing India. But growing up isn’t always a breeze, and even as they eat toothpaste for dessert and make ambitious plans to write their own musical, Get Lost on the Ganga and All That, they struggle to make sense of incomprehensible adults, Indira Gandhi, the Emergency, urine therapy, girls, and try, above all, to preserve innocence in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Wry, witty and utterly unsentimental, Tin Fish is an exhilarating ride.
A modern-day retelling of one of the world’s oldest epics One of the greatest epics in the world, the Mahabharata is a spectacular work of creative brilliance. More ingeniously conceived than the Iliad or the Odyssey, the Mahabharata delves deep into the human psyche, exploring the range of human ideals and emotions. Very often, however, a rendition of the Mahabharata, in its efforts to explore the ideological implications of the epic, loses sight of the fact that it is also a very human story – it is not only a tale of battles and philosophies but also a story about the people who fought those battles and lived those philosophies. In this imaginative retelling of the epic by Prof. Shiv K. Kumar, we rediscover the beauty of a magnificent tale that is ultimately propelled by the force of human emotions – love and hate, lust and vengeance, jealousy and greed, loyalty and betrayal.
From the author of the best-selling Keep the Change comes a new novel about Delhi’s suburbia. Set in Gurgaon, the dazzling face of modernity in India, Intermission takes us into the lives of Varun and Gayatri Sarin, not-so-happilymarried corporate couple with a typically NRI problem: settling back in chaotic India after several years spent in an ordered existence in the First World. Varun is pleased to be back and running his own business; Gayatri yearns for her friends and her life in the US and dislikes the transparently divisive society she has been flung back into. From inquisitive in-laws and absconding staff to potholes and pigs on the roads, there is a new difficulty to be tackled every day. Not to mention a teenage son with raging hormones. Then Varun meets Sweety, young mother – of – twins, who is living her dream of life in a nuclear family, and everything changes. For him, for Sweety, and insidiously, for everyone around them. A beautifully told story of illicit love and divided loyalties, Intermission is suburban fiction at its best.
- Karna by Ranjit Desai and Vikrant Pande
‘Who am I?’ It was a question that had troubled him all his life. His whole life had seemed entangled in the answer. His dignity, his destination, his ambitions — they all seemed linked to that entanglement. The irony was that the truth, instead of liberating him, had made him rudderless. In the Mahabharata, Karna is known to be the only warrior who could match Arjuna. Born of a god and a mother who abandons him at birth, Karna is mistreated from birth. Rejected by Drona, taunted by Draupadi, insulted by his blood brothers, misunderstood by many and manipulated even by the gods, Karna is the classic tragic hero. In his novel Radheya, Ranjit Desai, the author of Marathi classics like Shriman Yogi and Swami, gives voice to the angst and loneliness of Karna. Translated into English for the first time, the novel brings to surface the many sides to Karna’s character: his compassionate nature, his hurt and hubris, the love for his wife, his allegiance to Duryodhana, and his complicated relationship with Krishna.
Pather Panchali is a vivid, moving and authentic portrayal of the life of a Brahmin household seen through the eyes of the two young children of the family, Opu and his elder sister Durga. Few authors in any literature can rival Bandhopadhyaya’s understanding of the child mind. He writes of Opu and Bruga and their friends, at home or out at play with a natural realism unmarred by adult condescension.The social environment is all-embracing: qork and holidays, religious festivals, daily worship and the grim rites of death. The reader senses the reality of family ties, the power of the supernatural in ordinary things, the relations between the castes and between rich and poor. In creating this picture of rural Bengal, Bandopadhyay has introduced us to an area of life which so far has been a closed book to foreign visitors to India, and which scholars know little about. The translation which faithfully reflects the changing moods of the original as well as its many variations of style, is the work of T.W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji, both teachers of Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London.
27. Left from the Nameless Shop by Adithi Rao
Reminiscent of Malgudi Days, Adithi Rao’s debut Left from the Nameless Shop is a charming collection of interconnected stories set in the 1980s featuring the residents of Rudrapura, a small, fictitious town in Karnataka. This is a place bubbling with energy and the sense of community — one you probably lived in and loved while growing up. These are stories of the life you have left behind. One that you hope to return to.
In the sumptuous court of the emperor Akbar, in 16th century India, a group of artists begins the painstaking task of chronicling the emperor’s life. Bihzad is the son of the chief artist and as such, he is groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. A child prodigy, Bihzad is shielded from life as he grows up in the stunning fortress town of Agra. But as word of his talent spreads, rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open. When the young artist breaches the rules of the court, they will use his art to destroy him.
- No Surrender by Arden Sara
Sometimes the only way to forgiveness is sin…
Sean Dryden the superhot all-American golden boy—has always gotten under Kentucky Lee’s skin. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t in love with the Special Ops Aviation pilot… Even when he got engaged to her best friend. What Kentucky never knew is that Sean broke it off with Lynnie just a week before she died. Something has come apart in Sean—too many missions, too much loss. Only Kentucky seems to understand him… And the undercurrent running between them is tangible. That need to touch and taste—to remind themselves they’re still alive. Can the fire in her warm his frozen heart?
In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged, naive and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote village in Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to track him down. But as soon as Shalini arrives, she is confronted with the region’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. As life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could have dangerous repercussions for the people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay gives a potent critique of Indian politics and class prejudice through the lens of a guileless outsider, while also offering up a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.
Shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2018.Winner of the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction) 2018.’Intense, lyrical, and powerful … This is a remarkable debut.’ – Jeet ThayilAn astounding exploration of intense longings, Shubhangi Swarup’s novel begins in the depths of the Andaman Sea, and follows geological and emotional faultlines through the Irrawaddy delta and the tourist-trap of Thamel, to end amidst the highest glaciers and passes of the Karakorams. The story sweeps through worlds and times that are inhabited by: a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who talks to them; Lord Goodenough who travels around the furthest reaches of the Raj, giving names to nameless places; a geologist working towards ending futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a superstitious dictator and a mother struggling to get her revolutionary son released; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who turns first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself. Richly imaginative and irresistible in its storytelling, Latitudes of Longing announces the arrival of an incredible new literary talent.
- Aliyah by Sethu and Catherine Thankamma
Next time in Jerusalem’ — uttered every Passover, these words kindle, within the small Jewish community of Kerala, homesickness for their promised homeland. They must prepare to break all ties with the place they have known and loved for centuries — all in response to the Zionist call. Salamon, the tongue-tied, day-dreaming firstborn of his family, must decide whether to set sail or stay back as the last Jew in Cochin — the place where his ancestors had found sanctuary — for it was here that their roots had struck, amongst those who accepted them as neighbors, classmates, teachers. In this story of cultural and religious identity, told through three generations of a Jewish family in Kerala and their complex interpersonal relationships, Sethu weaves together myth, history, and fiction to create a compelling narrative about man’s constant search for home and permanence.
When Mia, acutely depressed by the suicide of her father, meets Karna, a young Indian guru who seems to have walked straight out of her father’s painting of the Kumbh Mela, she feels compelled to follow him all the way from London to India. And if marrying Vik, the suave corporate, will help her reach him, then so be it … In India, Mia hears of Indi, Vik’s accomplished, inordinately attractive mother who cannot cease raging against the limits imposed on her, by her blindness, her beauty, and her clinging son. To make sense of Indi’s anguished attempts to break free, and her own journey chasing a duplicitous love, Mia must travel to the Kumbha, to the heart of her father’s painting, where life, she learns, allows another perspective.
In a world in which you only have a space of nine by nine to call your own, where you share inedible meals and improbable dreams, and think you know each other inside out, how do you draw the line between private and public, discretion and transgression? For Anjali, suffocated by her mother’s unspoken demands, Tara – brilliant and eccentric free spirit – becomes both shield and shoulder, while tranquil Paro, with her unapologetic ambition to get married, represents a complete contrast to their restlessness. So, as Anjali furtively applies to universities abroad and Tara struggles with her doctoral thesis, Paro gets engaged to a suitable boy. Except, the engagement doesn’t last long. Paro’s return to the hostel signals a sudden disruption as relationships crumble and a sequence of disturbing even transforms their lives. Forever. A beautifully nuanced story of friendship and loss, Nine By Nine walks the tightrope of emotion with skillful restraint.
A suicide in an upper-class, politically connected business family is exactly the kind of case that Additional Commissioner of Police Nikhil Juneja likes to take on. Easy contacts, easy money and an easy conscience. But things don’t work out quite like that. The death becomes a murder, the contacts onerous and his conscience heavy. Like India in the mid 1990s, Juneja can’t decide which way to go. Chaotic and corrupt, yet with a lethally persuasive charm, Delhi, old and new, stars in this riveting debut novel about the banality of justice sought and deflected.
They are renaissance men. They are boulevardiers. They are three young Pakistani men in New York City at the turn-of-the-millennium: AC, a gangsta rap-spouting academic; Jimbo, a hulking Pushtun deejay from the streets of Jersey City; and Chuck, a wide-eyed, off-the-boat kid, searching for himself and the American Dream. In a city where origins matter less than the talent for self-invention, three Metrostanis have the guts to claim the place as their own. But when they embark on a road trip to the hinterland weeks after 9/11 in search of the Shaman, a Gatsbyesque compatriot who seemingly disappears into thin air, things go horribly wrong. Suddenly, they find themselves in a changed, charged America. Rollicking, bittersweet and sharply observed, Home Boy is at once an immigrant’s tale, a mystery, a story of love and loss as well as a unique meditation on Americana and notions of collective identity. It announces the debut of an original, electrifying voice in contemporary fiction.
It’s been twelve years since Happy, MP, Raamji and Ravin graduated. Well into their married lives, they realize that none of them had a bachelor party before their weddings. But it’s never too late to set things right. They go about planning their belated bachelor party – a Euro trip which, well, ends up becoming the trip of their lifetime. Picture this: It’s the middle of the night. The four friends wait to be strip-searched by the border police. They are stuck in the no-man’s land between Croatia and Slovenia, without valid visas, but with banned party drugs and a rifle cartridge …Welcome to one hell of a reunion! Bestselling author Ravinder Singh returns with his friends in a hilarious, moving story of friendship and adventure.
Zoravar begins his journey without a roadmap, spends his nights sleeping on the streets and struggles in the day as the junior-most apprentice to actors and directors, till a freak encounter makes his dream come true. This is the captivating story of the rise and fall of a superstar, set against the heady, glittering world of Hindi cinema.
Seventeen-year-old Unni Chacko has done something terrible. The only clue to his action lies in a comic strip he has drawn, which has fallen into the hands of his father Ousep, an anarchist. Ousep begins investigating the extraordinary life of his son, blissfully unaware that his long-suffering wife is plotting to kill him. Set in Madras in 1990, this is a darkly comic story involving the relentless pursuit of a failed writer who has found purpose, an adolescent cartoonist’s dangerous interpretation of truth, the plots of a brilliant housewife, and the pure love of a twelve-year-old boy for a beautiful girl.
Beautifully done… As honest a book as it is entertaining’ -The Times ‘ Funny yet deeply melancholic, this is a brilliant and remarkably mature second novel… A rare achievement’ -The Economist Twenty-first-century Mumbai is a city of new money and soaring real estate, and property kingpin Dharmen Shah has grand plans for its future. His offer to buy and tear down a weathered tower block, making way for luxury apartments, will make each of its residents rich – if all agree to sell. But not everyone wants to leave; many of the residents have lived there for a lifetime, many of them are no longer young. As tensions rise among the once civil neighbors, one by one those who oppose the offer give way to the majority, until only one man stands in Shah’s way: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji’s neighbors – friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned conspirators – may stop at nothing to score their payday.
- Shivaji by Ranjit Desai and Vikrant Pande
Young Shivaji reaches Pune, a dying fort city, with his mother Jijabai and lights the first lamp within its ruins. While his father Shahaji Bhosle is away on deputation by the Adil Shah sultanate after having failed in a revolt against it, Shivaji learns how an empire is built from the ground up. Thus begins the life of the Great Maratha. What awaits Shivaji is nothing short of the vast scroll of history, and it takes him from Surat to Thanjavur and all the way to Aurangzeb’s durbar in Agra. He dreams of freeing his land from the clutches of Mughal rule, and though he suffers many defeats and personal losses along the way he never gives up his vision of Hindavi Swaraj. Amidst political intrigue and a chain of skirmishes, Shivaji becomes a leader, a warrior and a tactician par excellence, driven by immense pride and love for his motherland.
- Switch by Megan Hart
Don’t Think. Don’t Question. Just Do. SHALL WE BEGIN? This is your first list. You will follow each instruction perfectly. There is no margin for error. Your reward will be my attention and command. The anonymous note wasn’t for me. It was just a piece of paper with a few lines scrawled on it. The black looping letters looked so innocent. They were not. Before the note, if a man had told me what to do, I’d have told him where to go. But now I’m learning that submission is an art. Doing Someone’s bidding is …. exciting, liberating – even addictive.
Ayyan Mani appears to be just another man in Mumbai, stranded in the rot of a good marriage, an unremarkable life and a dead-end job as personal assistant to an insufferable astronomer called Arvind Acharya at the Institute of Theory and Research. To entertain himself and to give his wife the hope that they are heading towards a spectacular future, Ayyan embarks upon a secret game, weaving an outrageous fiction around his ten-year old son. As he builds the small plots to promote the myth, he sets in motion a chain of events that soon threatens to overtake him. When the formidable reputation of Arvind Acharya, who is obsessed with the theory that microscopic extraterrestrials are falling on Earth all the time, plummets after a major scandal, and he is rocked by the vicious office politics in the institute, Ayyan sees in the crisis an opportunity to further his own game and make his son a national celebrity. But in the exhilaration of the game lurks danger. Alternately funny and poignant, Serious Men is a savage satire on class, love, relationships, and our veneration of science.
Cricket, drugs and illicit romance every time TV journalist Anjana Gurunath sees hot young cricketer Avinash Katagi, her heart starts pounding, her mouth goes dry and she forgets she is married. By the look of things, Avinash seems to have been hit by the ‘love’ bug as well. Anjana is curious as to why one of the country’s most sought-after bachelors is wooing her. What is his intent? Avinash’s poetry and late-night phone calls disturb the perfect calm of her marriage but her husband Naren, who has stood by her through thick and thin, thinks she will eventually see sense. Meanwhile, her channel breaks the news of the scoop on TV and there is chaos. Who is her source? Delirium is a steamy affair, high-octane action, nail-biting suspense, and heartbreak all rolled into one.
Miriam is young, attractive and unhappily married. Taking a break from her job as internal security officer at the palace of the Maldivian president, she comes to Trivandrum to write a novel. Honey Kumar is a police officer on a punishment transfer from Delhi to Trivandrum for a spectacular act of graft. When Miriam refuses to comply with Honey Kumar’s demands for sexual favours in return for extending her visa, he fabricates an espionage charge against her and arrests her. Before long, Miriam, who has secrets of her own, realizes that the tropical vacation spot she has landed in is like a hallucinogenic dream, where everybody has a tale to tell. They collectively contribute to a fable about her as a spy and a honey trap, shaking her up and shaping her struggle. Inspired by a real-life incident, Hadal is an incisive critique of the rot at the heart of India and the corruption, physical and spiritual, that permeates the structures of authority.
Asfandyar Ikram has no idea that his father, Anis Nabi, is alive – until the day he learns of his death. As he arrives in Karachi for the last rites, he is greeted by three old men, his father’s friends. Over the next forty-eight hours, through strikes and rioting, Anis’s final wishes must be fulfilled – except, Asfandyar does not know what they are and the men will not reveal them. Instead, a mysterious woman arrives to distract him. As Asfandyar grapples with his murky patrimony, an extraordinary adventure unfolds in which the truth seems forever out of his reach. A powerful parable for Pakistan, Daddy’s Boy spins a chillingly vivid tale of desire and deception – and the ultimately devastating consequences of hypocrisy.
Dinesh opens the door to the Kapoor flat to find Lata, the enchantress who works at Mrs Aly Khan’s, carrying a hot case with freshly made gaajar ka halwa. On the first floor, the inquisitive Mrs Mody wipes the dust off her precious binoculars to spy on the building’s security guard. The Singhs open the doors of their SUV, their four boys creating a ruckus – they are the newcomers, the outsiders. Through the peephole, the ever-watchful Mrs Ranganekar observes their arrival. Welcome to Paradise Towers, an apartment building in central Mumbai. Everyone here has a story to tell. Or maybe they have stories to hide. Shweta Bachchan-Nanda’s quirky, intimate debut explores the intertwined lives in this building – a forbidden romance, an elopement, the undercurrents of tension in corridor interactions and an explosive Diwali celebration. Bachchan-Nanda’s is a dazzling voice that will draw you into the intoxicating, crazy world that is Paradise Towers.
What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street? You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course.Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead.Samrat’s rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades – and self-confidence – plummet. Soon, Samrat’s quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn’t planned on visiting – prison, for example – and makes him do things he hadn’t banked on doing: ‘meditating’ stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares. Does Samrat – Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead – survive his fall from grace?
This is the story of Naiya Kapur, a Princeton University graduate who comes to Mumbai to chase the big Indian dream – Bollywood. Naiya isn’t searching for her soulmate, or hoping to find her roots in the India her parents once knew; she is searching for fame, fortune and fun in the new India. We follow Naiya as she navigates the labyrinthine lanes of Mumbai and Bollywood, where identities are fluid and murky – and where lines are meant to be crossed. In the middle of scuttling between auditions and parties of every hue, Naiya enters into a potentially ‘happily ever after’ relationship – that turns out to be an ‘it’s complicated’ one – with a neurotic ex-model-turned-film producer. As she battles her demons and tries to deal with her increasingly tangled life, the stage is set for high drama, and her Opening Night.
In a sprawling bungalow on New Delhi’s posh Hailey Road, Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur and his wife Mamta spend their days watching anxiously over their five beautiful (but troublesome) alphabetically named daughters. Anjini, married but an incorrigible flirt; Binodini, very worried about her children’s hissa in the family property; Chandrakanta, who eloped with a foreigner on the eve of her wedding; Eshwari, who is just a little too popular at Modern School, Barakhamba Road; and the Judge’s favorite (though fathers shouldn’t have favorites): the quietly fiery Debjani, champion of all the stray animals on Hailey Road, who reads the English news on DD and clashes constantly with crusading journalist Dylan Singh Shekhawat, he of shining professional credentials but tarnished personal reputation, crushingly dismissive of her ‘state-sponsored propaganda’, but always seeking her out with half-sarcastic, half-intrigued dark eyes. Spot-on funny and toe-curlingly sexy, Those Pricey Thakur Girls is rom-com specialist Anuja Chauhan writing at her sparkling best.
In the blind home that Baba runs, the residents can see. Sharfu sees through fingers that weave bamboo strands into beautiful baskets. Even blinded by desires, Roni sees through her lovers. Bhola keeps a watchful eye over his friends through intuition and guile. Yet, when Baba, the guardian, and mentor to them all, regains sight in an accident, all he sees is a corrupt and decadent world. Joginder Paul, one of the greats of Urdu literature, tells a powerful story about sight and perception, and how it impacts many facets of human existence: territoriality, greed, selfishness, corruption, acceptance, and discovery. Blind is a powerful metaphor for a country and a society that is crippled by spiritual and moral degeneration. Sparked off by a visit to a blind home in Nairobi, Paul’s story appears to ask: of what use is a sight for those who only look but do not see?
In The Vigil, the familiar rhythm of the original poem is stirred up by Angadan’s ascetic touch. Sarah Joseph provides a new spin to the grand old story, bringing in contemporary concerns such as the environment, peace, and women’s empowerment, and provides a new path, a fresh way of understanding it.
His married daughter is having trouble conceiving, his son’s call centre job might be a cover for something murkier, and his wife expects him to solve these problems. Then there is Pinki Kaur, a colleague and his friend’s widow, whose presence in the office stirs responses in him that he can neither submit to nor suppress. Distracted by personal crises, he misses the signs of political trouble brewing at work, and so it is that Naresh finds himself suspended from his job. Unseated from the desk that has been the source of his power and well-being, he must still struggle to make things right for his family: Naresh is, after all, a householder. With uncommon acuity, Amitabha Bagchi writes of a world where favours are currency, where access to power sometimes feels like a prerequisite for survival, where power can be both total and ephemeral. The Householder is a view from within this world, an examination of the moral condition of our times.
- In The Flesh by Da Costa Portia
Fifty Shades meets Mr Darcy. A Regency spin on the classic story of an innocent heroine discovering the truth depth of her desires. Regency society already believes she’s a scarlet woman. Why not become one? Beatrice Weatherly’s reputation is in tatters. With scandalous pictures of her being scrutinised by the ton and her brother running them into debt, Beatrice’s only hope a respectable marriage is dashed. Then powerful, wealthy Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie offers an indecent proposal: for one month of hedonistic servitude, he’ll pay off her brothers debts. But nothing can prepare Beatrice for the worst, for discovering that she enjoys her degradation and delights in the dark fantasies that Edmund has awakened. In fact, she is fast becoming addicted to a life and a man that can never wholly be hers.
55. The Tailor Of Giripul by Bulbul Sharma
Redolent with the smells and sounds of a village buried in another time, this is a novel about an India we rarely read about.
- Little Secrets: Secretly Pregnant by Laurence Andrea
Emma is usually the cautious one, once – once – at a party she let herself go, only to find herself pregnant by her masked lover. Then he turns up in the last place she expects: work! He’s the rebel CEO of the company she’s auditing. Will she be able to resist mixing business with pleasure?
The Encyclopaedia Medicinae at the Central Library is the repository of a dizzying array of ailments, and Maximo is thrilled to get a peek at the obscure afflictions: An amnesia that causes everyone you’ve ever met to forget you exist, while you remain painfully aware of your history. A malady that erodes the link between cause and effect: one man commits a murder, another carries the guilt and a third is sentenced for it.A condition that causes your body to imitate death — stopping your heart, cooling your blood. Will the fit pass before they bury you, or after? As Maximo soon discovers, the pursuit of knowledge at the Central Library is tangled up with the humours and inclinations of the writers and their times. The Afflictions is the brilliant first novel by physician-scientist Vikram Paralkar, whose The Wounds of the Dead garnered much critical acclaim.
Winner of the Atta Galatta – Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize (Fiction) 2019. Renowned for bringing the marvellous to the ordinary, Vinod Kumar Shukla has long been recognized as one of India’s foremost writers, with a voice uniquely his own. The stories in Blue Is Like Blue deal with ‘smaller-than-life people’. They live in rented accommodation, often in single rooms, where one electric bulb does for light. There’s a nail to hang clothes from and a wall-to-wall string for the washing. When the clothes are dry, you place the carefully folded shirt under a pillow and lie down to sleep. Money is a concern, but the bazaar is the place to go and spend time in, especially if you have nothing to buy. The fear that you may be overcharged accompanies every transaction, but joy is not entirely absent. Few works of modern Indian literature come alive in English, and fewer still in the way that these stories do in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai’s brilliant translation.
Rich Like Us is many individual histories, and many voices, in one – a compelling and vivid tapestry of India’s past and present. Above all it is the story of Rose the cockney memsahib, brought by the worldly Ram from London forty years before to a family that neither wants nor welcomes her. In Nayantara Sahgal’s tale, with its humour and tragedy, is mirrored some of the grandeur and folly of the Indian experience itself.
The uncoolness of her name plagues B. Damayanthi, along with the bunch of unsuitable prospective husbands her Amma throws at her, a dead-end job as an accountant in a decrepit firm, the oppressiveness of Chennai. When she finally jettisons her job and some of her inhibitions to join a bank in Mumbai, Amma’s parting words are: ‘Be good. Don’t do anything silly.’ Translation: ‘Stay away from sex and alcohol! ‘ Soon Damayanthi is negotiating competitive corporate corridors and big-city life. Aided by dubious words of wisdom from the cherub-faced Jimmy, she must impress the intellectual C.G., who has a low opinion of her; battle Sonya Sood, flatmate and size-zero sophisticate, for the TV remote; choose between resisting or giving in to temptation in the form of the seductive Rahul; deal with the moral dilemma of ‘stealing’ a million-dollar idea for her project. Can a good girl have a really good time? Can the conservative, curd-rice-eating Damayanthi become a cool, corporate babe? Keep the Change is a rollicking, wickedly witty story of every girl’s journey to fulfil her dreams and find her own place in the world.
A rousing tale of celebrity, sex and, of course, scandal. Not only is Ricky Kumar, handsome hunk and mama’s boy, being prepared for his launch as a Bollywood star, he has also just managed to score with the love of his life. But things begin to go horribly wrong when London-born playboy and restaurant tycoon Gautam Goyal checks into a drug rehab facility in Mumbai. A case of mistaken identity looks like it will lose Ricky everything he has been poised to achieve and pits the two against each other in a struggle played out in the harsh glare of the media spotlight. A wicked, sharply observed satire of Bollywood, high society shenanigans and our obsession with celebrity, Scandal Point is an unputdownable novel, at once hilarious and thought-provoking.
The Adhikaris are a regular, happy family – or so they will have you believe. But at the dinner table, a silence hangs heavy over the three children, especially Arihant and Ishan. Twenty-two-year-old Arihant possesses a secret talent and a shattered heart. He yearns for his muse and ex-girlfriend, only to surprise himself when they finally meet after a long and difficult time apart. If only Ishan could share some brotherly advice rather than sneak about, aloof and increasingly suspicious. Ishan twenty-eight, seems to have the job of his dreams – or at least, his parents’ dreams. But how long can he stay torn between two worlds? How long before someone finds out about his evenings: about the place he goes to and the woman he sees. Here is a story set in the calm before a storm – after which nothing will be the same for this seemingly happy household.
- Angel by by Reisz Tiffany
More scorching than Fifty shades, The Angel is the second book in Tiffanys Original Sinners BDSM Romance trilogy. She wanted him… Nora Sutherlin is hiding. On paper, she’s following her master sorders and her flesh is willing. More deeply, stronger thrashed wanted anyone But her mind is wandering to a man from her past, whose hold on her heart is less bruising, but whose absence is no less painful. Instead of letting him make love to her, she let him go. This is the story of a summer that proves that love hurts.
Nikhil Arya has fallen. Once, he was an Ivy League scholar with a promising future at NASA; now, at forty, he is broke, homeless, and minutes away from blowing his brains out in a diabolical modern-day joust. It wasn’t meant to be this way. An innocent vacation turned into an epic intercontinental journey that saw Nikhil become first a genocide survivor, then a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software mogul and a deadly game fighter. Now, twenty years later, Nikhil aka Johnny is tired of running. With the Colombian mafia on his trail and his abandoned wife and son ten thousand miles away, he prepares for his final act, aware that he will have lost even if he wins. Or will he? Is there any greater victory than living a life that knows no limits, a world that has seen no boundaries? From the bestselling author of Keep Off the Grass comes the once-in-a-lifetime story of an ordinary man fighting an extraordinary destiny. Can he pick up the pieces one last time or will Nikhil, now Johnny, go down for good?
Very little is known about Jesus in his formative years. In the Gospel stories, we witness the birth of Jesus and then see him as a young boy of twelve, intensely questioning the Rabbis in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He does not reappear until age thirty when he emerges as the potent and stirring rebel baptized by John at the River Jordan. What happened to Jesus in those lost years? How did Jesus the boy become Christ the Saviour? These are the questions that motivate bestselling writer Deepak Chopra to attempt a fresh re-imagining of a young man’s transformational journey from carpenter’s son to the revolutionary leader to spiritual saviour. From his unceremonious birth in Bethlehem to the ultimate betrayal by his friend Judas in Jerusalem, Chopra captures the life of one of the world’s most written about men, as never before. Deepak Chopra is the founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. He has been a bestselling author for decades, and his writings have sold millions of copies.
In this retelling of Govardhanram Tripathi’s sprawling magnum opus, Saraswatichandra, Sameer Acharya makes accessible and brings to life for a modern readership one of Indian literature’s great classics. Set in late nineteenth-century India, this is the story of an educated and spiritual young man whose life is at a crossroads. Betrothed to and in love with Kumud, he nevertheless breaks off their engagement due to escalating familial tensions and leaves Bombay to learn about his country and seek enlightenment. A series of events leads both Kumud, now married and Saraswatichandra to an ashram, where they must decide how to go on with their lives … At its heart, this is a novel about India where tradition and modernity are locked in battle.
On a drunken party night, young and attractive Lakshmi kidnaps Placid Hari, a journalist, mistaking him to be the man who raped her sixteen years ago. The morning after alters the course of events: Lakshmi and Hari find themselves taken hostage in a terrorist siege of Bombay along with a teenage fledgling actor. The jihadi-in-charge is the boy-soldier Salim, trained in Pakistan by Abul Razak, the object of whose hallucinogenic passion is Salim’s mother. Before the day is done, Salim finds that nothing back home could have prepared him for the fatal eventualities of his mission and his tryst with the compelling story of blood and tears that his captives have to tell.
Vavachan is a Pulayan who gets the opportunity to play a policeman with an immense moustache in a musical drama. The character appears in only two scenes and has no dialogue. However, Vavachan’s performance, and his moustache, terrify the mostly upper-caste audience, reviving in them memories of characters of Dalit power, such as Ravanan. Afterwards, Vavachan, whose people were traditionally banned from growing facial hair, refuses to shave off his moustache. Endless tales invent and reinvent the legend of his magic moustache in which birds roost, which allows its owner to appear simultaneously in different places and disappear in an instant, which grows as high as the sky and as thick as rainclouds — and turn Vavachan into Moustache, a figure of mythic proportions. Set in Kuttanad, a below-sea-level farming region on the south-west coast of Kerala, the novel is as much a story of this land as it is of Vavachan and its other inhabitants. As they navigate the intricate waterscape, stories unfold in which ecology, power dynamics and politics become key themes. Originally published in Malayalam as Meesha, S. Hareesh’s Moustache is a contemporary classic mixing magic, myth and metaphor into a tale of far-reaching resonance.
Manjunath Kumar, fourteen, knows he is good at cricket – if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling and is fascinated by the world of CSI and by curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things about himself and about the world that he doesn’t know. When Manju begins to get to know Radha’s great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju’s world begins to change and he is faced with decisions that will change both his sense of self and of the world around him.
‘Brinda Charry is the real thing, a master at the top of her game. Her work engages the human condition and the personal with an intensity and authority that can only be explained by literary grace.’ – Arthur R. Flowers When a new family moves in next door, a young girl finds herself falling in love for the first time ever. As she jealously attempts to keep the object of her love to herself, she moves deeper into a web of imagination and deceit and further away from the innocence of childhood. The warmth and intimacy of this moving tale also enriches ‘Mallika’, the story of a little boy and girl who are fascinated with their neighbour, a eunuch; ‘The Secret’, the escapades of a middle-aged bachelor who yearns for some excitement in his life and finds it in marriage; ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, an unusual take on the popular folktale, and the other stories in this unforgettable collection from southern India.
A boy who can predict the exact date a person will die… An elderly woman who knows that death is close, but learns how to cheat it… A child with a dangerous friend who happens to be invisible… A ghost who can’t stop reliving his suicide over and over again…People you’ll wish you never have to meet, and stories you’ll never forget. Skilfully translated into English for the very first time, these chilling tales from master storyteller Ratnakar Matkari are bound to keep readers of all ages up at night. With every page you turn, you’ll be looking over your shoulder to make sure no one’s there. Look again. Maybe there is!
Fifteen-year-old Amrit disappears from her house in the middle of the night and returns a different person. Over the next two decades, her actions affect three generations of her Sikh family in Singapore. When Narain, her brother, leaves his new life in America to take care of her, he must find his place again in a country and a community that will not accept him for who he is. Gurdev, the eldest, raises his three daughters with fear and caution over what they might become. And Harbeer, whose wife has left him, is the unyielding patriarch who must reconcile his pride and learn to cope with his own demons. Balli Kaur Jaswal’s award-winning first novel is a tender yet powerful portrayal of mental illness. It is also a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family struggling to preserve tradition in the face of an ever-changing nation.
Brinda is born in a traditional joint family, but behind the veneer of normalcy lurks an enigmatic life. She has detailed memory of things that happened before her birth. Physical contact with her heals the sick, the rotten and the corrupt. Brutalised repeatedly, she only becomes more beautiful and remains inviolate, unable to achieve physical intimacy even with the man she loves. There comes a time when she is arrested without any charges and moved from prison to prison. But in a world where time and history are as fluid as her memory, she stays radiantly young while those around her age and decay. Both as witness and victim, she lives through the horrors of a society sliding into superstition and intolerance. Ultimately, she is subjected to a farcical trial where every aspect of her past is presented to the court in a dark, new light before a tragic conclusion. Once Upon a Time is Ashok Srinivasan’s powerful debut novel and the successor to his prize-winning collection of short stories, Book of Common Signs. A multi-layered fairy tale for adults that comes close to some of the harshest cruelties of our times, it reconfirms the arrival of an important new writer on India’s literary firmament.
The Prince Who Would Be King … The popular tellings of the Mahabharata are about Duryodhana’s deviousness, obstinacy and greed for power that would bring about the battle of Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and hisown downfall. But was there more to him? Was he all black, or was it a matter of shades of grey? What was he? True heir or pretender to the throne? Arch villain or brave prince defending his rajadharma? Ace strategist or wicked schemer? History, they say, is written by the victors. So we have never heard the side that Duryodhana presents. The epic’s enigmatic villain finally hashis say — on people, their motives and their machinations. For the first time we read a different meaning into episodes we may be familiar with –be it the attempted killing of Bhima, the burning of the wax house, the famous game of dice or even Draupadi’s vastraharan — and get insights into the story we may not have come across before. Here is the crown prince of Hastinapura as we have never known him, adding yet another dimension to the labyrinth that is the Mahabharata.
It’s the winter of 1946. A truck leaves the village of Campbellpur after news of the impending Partition pours in. It is carrying people who don’t know where they will go. They have just heard words like ‘border’ and ‘refugee’, and are struggling to understand how drawing a line might carve out Pakistan from Hindustan. As they reach the border, the caravan disperses and people go their own ways. Gulzar’s first novel tracks the lives of the people in that truck right from 1946 up to the Kargil war. A novel on what the Partition entailed for ordinary people, Two is also a meditation on the fact that the division of India and the carnage that followed, once set into motion, kept happening inexorably and ceaselessly, and people like those who left their homes on that truck never found another home; they kept looking for a place called home, a place to belong to.
Shashi: an actor, wealthy, famous, and letting go … of his career, his marriage, his mind, and now himself. Lisha: creator of Stoneman, her own private fantasy world within a comic book. Fragile and alone, except for her mother. In 1986, in Stonewall, Lancashire, Lisha doesn’t know she’s about to die. She doesn’t know that in the darkness outside, three boys are circling her house with minds full of hate. And she doesn’t know that, seventeen years into the future, a drunken actor lies unconscious in a London bedsit, fighting to save her life. A mind-bending portrait of post-traumatic breakdown, and a timely critique of our celebrity and success-based culture, The Dreamer is most of all a love story that unites Shashi and Lisha not only across time and space, but across death itself.
Narasimha, once a brave soldier, has left the war and lies low as a physician in a village. But a familiar face from his past seeks his help to stop the tyranny of the blind usurper Andhaka. If Narasimha refuses, the world might just end. What will he do? And why did he leave the war in the first place? Prahlad, the interim king of Kashyapuri, is torn between the ideals of his unrighteous father and his love for Lord Vishnu. Whom will he choose? Hiranyakashyap, the ruler of the Asura Empire, wants to avenge the death of his wife. To do that, he must go through the Trials and get the ultimate weapon – the Brahmastra. But the Trials have sent so many others to their death. Can Hiranyakashyap survive? Welcome to the reimagining of the fourth Avatar of Lord Vishnu by bestselling author Kevin Missal.
A stone wall at the periphery of a village somewhere in Karnataka guards a dangerous mystery. Yet, four generations of women from the headman’s family – helpless and spirited, headstrong and weak with desire – have a wayward fascination with it. And with Annaiah who comes, some say, from across the wall. Tradition and subversion coexist with superstitions and the slow advent of modernity in this powerful novel where time is a wilful beast and the gods walk among us.
- The Good Girl by by Kubica Mary
Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner–city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on–again, off–again boyfriend. When he doesn’t show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, at first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one–night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia’s life. Mia soon finds herself at the centre of a wild extortion plot. Colin’s job was to abduct Mia and deliver her to his employers. But the plan takes an unexpected turn when Colin suddenly decides to hide Mia in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota, evading the police and his deadly superiors. Mia’s mother, Eve, and Detective Gabe Hoffman will stop at nothing to find them, but no one could have predicted the emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family’s world to shatter.
- Possession by Graham Lynne & Yates Maisey
Possession Lynne Graham and Maisey Yates Intense, exciting novelists Blackmailed into Bed Ella desperately wants to care for her baby niece, but the child’s guardian is Aristandros Xenakis-her ex-fiance! She has no choice but to submit to his demand-she must become his mistress! Naive and unworldly Ella is not like Aristandros’ usual sophisticated bed partners. Surely he will tire of her? Her Proposal, His Possession When Elaine presented her plan to Marco de Luca, shed expected questions and logic, not the pure animal magnetism that this fierce tycoon exuded. Suddenly her proposal of a paper marriage seemed ludicrous. She had a tiger by the tail; Marco was no modern man-his wife would be his wife by day and night!
A firebrand ex-Naxal who seems to have gone missing at a critical juncture. A veteran journalist accompanied by a young and naive sub-editor determined to find the truth. A suave but ruthless politician with a hidden agenda, equally determined to stop the truth from getting out. A gang of hardened criminals ready to do his bidding in cohorts with the police. Helpless villagers who are mere pawns in a bigger game. And a group of anxious editors waiting in the claustrophobic newsroom of The Sentinel for the night to pass and the next day’s ‘anchor’ to unfold in the killing fields of a village on the outskirts of Kolkata. Over the course of an unforgettable, stifling, rain-soaked night, the lives of these characters intertwine, clash and are changed inexorably. In Anchor, Avik Chanda presents a picture of Kolkata in the late 1990s, and serving as its foil, a tiny fictional village, where people risk losing their homes, land – and finally, even their lives.
When Baba – head of the mighty Badshah empire – announces that he will hand over the reins of his business to the grandchild who proves his mettle, Sohana Badshah, sole granddaughter, decides she too will play that game. Who knows, it’s the sort of struggle against the odds that may even help her win back the peerless and compassionate Jag. Suddenly, from the overindulged, indecisive, socialite sister, Sohana becomes a rival to reckon with, and there’s more than one person who’d like to see her fail. In this pacey, whirlwind of a follow-up to Bombay Girl, the young, sheltered Badshah heiress struggles to keep her footing in a man’s world. Still discovering her street-smarts and business-savvy, will she flounder or will she be able to negotiate the twists and turns of this unfamiliar new universe? In Kavita Daswani’s Betrayed, high intrigue is on just the other side of a social shindig.
A controversial novel based on the life of India’s most celebrated painter, Raja Ravi Varma. He was accused of making the gods look like humans and insulting them by portraying them in the nude. He countered that he saw divinity in both gods and humans, and that nudity was the purest form he knew. This is the story of a little boy who grew up making charcoal sketches on freshly whitewashed temple walls and went on to be titled in the court of Thiruvananthapuram as ‘Raja’ for his artistic prowess. His painting of a Nair woman who worked in his wife’s palace brought him wrath and recognition alike. His deep involvement with Sugandha, the Maharastrian lady, who became Menaka, Damayanti and Urvashi in his most acclaimed works caught the fancy of many critics and admirers.
- Shala by Milind Bokil and Vikrant Pande
Mukund Joshi is fourteen and newly in love. He attends the same private tuitions as his classmate, Shirodkar, just for a glimpse of her, and follows her back home every day. Sadly, she has not a clue that he is pining away for her, because in their society, boys and girls don’t interact freely, much less talk about love. When he’s not negotiating the tricky alleys of love, Mukund sits around the school field or loafs about town with his close friends, Surya, Chitre and Phawdya, railing against the education system, and debating ideas such as discipline and Bohemianism. Set in a small Maharashtrian town during the Emergency of 1975, Shala is a heart-warming, nuanced novel about the adolescent struggles that are as tortuous in real time as they are amusing in retrospect.
Indian Bollywood League, India’s premier T20 cricket tournament, is all set for its second edition. With the hard cash that it spins around, the league is as much about cricket as it is about the starts involved-both on the field and off it, Kings of Bollywood, glamorous starlets, cricketing demi-gods, business tycoons-everyone has something to gain and a whole lot to lose during this 35-day extravaganza. But upsetting the apple-cart for many of them is FIP, the Fake IBL Player, spreading gossip and tainting reputations with the scandalous revelations on his blog. Now super-sleuth Parminder Mahipal Singh, a.k.a. Detective PMS, has been roped in to go undercover and find the treacherous rat. With big bucks, bigger personality and fragile egos batting for supremacy, can politics conspiracy and deception be far behind? Will PMS be able to stop the Fake IBL Player from spreading his poison? And what exactly does happen behind the scenes in crickets richest league?
Aparajito is the sequel to Pather Panchali, Bibhutibushan Bandopadhyay’s best known novel. In Pather Panchali the story revolves around Harihar Roy, his wife Sabajya, daughter Durga and son Apu whose vision of the future remains positive. Aparajito carries forward this vision through Apu’s adolescence and youth. The story takes the reader through Apu’s school days at the village. His thirst for knowledge and an insatiable desire to see the world drive him to the city and he joins college for higher education. For the first time in his life he has to battle not just poverty but also the complexities of human relationships and other harsh realities of life, without support or assistance from anywhere. After his mother’s death, a tragic marriage and years of carefree living, Apu finally realises his responsibilities and returns to his roots accompanied by his like-minded son, Kajal.
- Broken by Hart Megan
My name is different every month, Brandy, Honey, Amy, sometimes Joe doesn’t even bother to ask but he never fails to arouse me with his body, his mouth, his touch, no matter what I’m called or where he picks me up. The sex is always amazing, always leaves me itching for more in those long weeks until I see him again. My real name is Sadie, and once a month over lunch Joe tells me about his latest conquest. But what Joe doesn’t know is that in my mind, I’m the star of every X-rated one-night stand he has revealed to me, or that I’m practically obsessed with our imaginary sex life. I know it’s wrong. I know my husband wouldn’t understand. But I can’t stop. Not yet.
A brilliant first novel about old age, dysfunctional relationships and the disorientation of beliefs, Damage is the story of Beatrice, a fanatical Indian Christian missionary and Gudda, her youngest daughter, a missionary-hater, separated from her husband and therefore doomed to be the one out of four sisters to return home to look after an ailing mother. With a shrilly evangelical mother, a broken marriage and sisters who suspect she is around only to usurp the family property, Gudda is already insecure when a new government comes to power in New Delhi at whose behest Christians are brutally attacked all over India. Gudda is caught between her dislike for her kin and a growing sense of kinship with the community and faith she has for so long ignored. Amrita Lila Kumar has been editor-in-chief, Roli Books, associate editor, Penguin Books India, managing editor, Encyclopedia Britannica, and freelance editor with Rupa & Co. and HarperCollins. She is currently senior editor with Osian’s literary agency in New Delhi. This is her first novel.
Social media manager and popular blogger Aisha is flirty and flamboyant … even as she battles personal demons that tell her she must stop eating if she wants to stay pretty. Ruhi couldn’t be more different from her friend Aisha. Working at Litracy Publishing, she feels grossly under-appreciated by the editor-in-chief, who happens to be her mother. What keeps her going are her own ambitions – and her handsome author Tejas. Bestselling novelist Tejas has a bad case of writer’s block. He leans on Ruhi for emotional support before getting enamoured by Aisha as he struggles to live up to everyone’s expectations, including his own. Bold and unapologetic, this is a story of love and self-discovery, heartache and book launches.
Why do they call you Baaz?’ ‘It means falcon,’ he replies solemnly. ‘Or bird of prey. Because I swoop down on the enemy planes just like a Baaz would.’ Then he grins. The grey eyes sparkle. ‘It’s also short for bastard.’1971. The USSR-backed India-Mukti Bahini alliance is on the brink of war against the America-aided Pakistani forces. As the Cold War threatens to turn red hot, handsome, laughing Ishaan Faujdaar, a farm boy from Chakkahera, Haryana, is elated to be in the IAF, flying the Gnat, a tiny fighter plane nicknamed ‘Sabre Slayer’ for the devastation it has wreaked in the ranks of Pakistan’s F-86 Sabre Squadrons. Flanked by his buddies Raks, a MiG-21 Fighter, Maddy, a transport pilot who flies a Caribou, and fellow Gnatties Jana, Gana and Mana, Shaanu has nothing on his mind but glory and adventure – until he encounters Tehmina Dadyseth, famed bathing beauty and sister of a dead fauji, who makes him question the very concept of nationalism and whose eyes fill with disillusioned scorn whenever people wax eloquent about patriotism and war…Pulsating with love, laughter and courage, Baaz is Anuja Chauhan’s tribute to our men in uniform.
Junaid, chef and restaurateur, has much to live up to as the grandson of the famous Junaid of Fatehgarh, whose secret recipe he is entrusted with. His world is changed forever when he falls in love with Alice Munro, whose great-grandmother’s diaries reveal the unimaginable — that Junaid’s grandfather built his family’s fortunes with an act of treachery. Seeking redemption, Junaid and Alice embark on a search for the truth — a quest that continues even after Alice’s untimely death, as Junaid and their daughter, Sara, uncover a tale of love and betrayal. Poignant and powerful, Sara is an unforgettable story of hope and loss … and all the strength it takes to heal.
My name is Suranjan. You don’t recognize me? You wrote a novel about me. It was called Lajja.’ One day in Calcutta, Taslima suddenly finds herself face to face with Suranjan, the principal character from her controversial novel Lajja. Persecuted in their native Bangladesh, Suranjan and his family have, like Taslima, moved to the city across the border. But is life for a Hindu family from an Islamic nation any better in a country where a majority of the population happens to be Hindu? Leading poor, unmoored lives, exploited and frustrated at every step of the way, and always carrying with them the memories of a scarred communal history, Suranjan and so many others like him seem to lead incomplete lives in their so-called ‘safe haven’. Shameless, the explosive sequel to Lajja, is an uncompromising, heart-breaking look at ordinary people’s lives in our troubled times.
Living a life that straddles the virtual and the real, enmeshed in technology and inspired by it, Param is a young man in the city. In his world, the virtual is as real as reality itself. But when a friend asks Param what he would do if he had just seven days to live, he answers, ‘I would go to the Himalayas.’ Intrigued by his own response, Param sets out on a journey to the Himalayas, the land of his ancestors. En route, he makes an unscheduled stop at a village – one that would change his life. The village turns out to be a place of adventure, and home to a number of compelling characters, from the wise Suyash the Cobbler to the cheeky young boys Chilli and Polta, the kind farmer Kisanji and the endearing dog Poppy. Param discovers the joys of a simpler way of life. But can he resist the pull of his home world? Thought-provoking and heart-warming, Param is a fable about the many worlds we dwell in and the many masks we wear.
- Shahenshah by S. Inamdar and Vikrant Pande
Aurangzeb must rebel against his father, and compete with his brothers, especially Darashikoh who is Emperor Shah Jahan’s favoured son, to become the shahenshah of India and sit on the Peacock Throne. In politics, after all, trust and betrayal are two edges of the same sword. Meanwhile, in his zenankhana, the begums, constantly worrying about inheritance and bloodlines, grow jittery at the arrival of Hira, a mere concubine, who seems to have all of Aurangzeb’s heart. Shahenshah: The Life of Aurangzeb unravels the inner life of the formidable emperor, and the twists of fate and duty that come with a crown. An all-time favourite of Marathi literature, this is the most popular of N.S. Inamdar’s sixteen hugely successful historical novels. This effortless translation tells an intricate, affecting story of a deeply misunderstood Mughal.
First published in 1956, Chemmeen tells the story of the relationship between Karutthamma, a Hindu woman from the fisherfolk community, and Pareekkutty, the son of a Muslim fish wholesaler. Unable to live with the man she loves, Karutthamma marries Palani, who, despite the scandal about his wife’s past, never stops trusting her, a trust that is reaffirmed each time he goes to sea and comes back safe since the ‘sea-mother’ myth among the fishermen community goes that the safe return of a fisherman depends on the fidelity of his wife. Then, one night, Karutthamma and Pareekkutty meet and their love is rekindled while Palani is at sea, baiting a shark … The hugely successful novel was adapted into a film of the same name, and won critical acclaim and commercial success. Anita Nair’s evocative translation brings this classic of Indian literature to a new generation that hasn’t had the opportunity to savour this tale of love and longing.
Kintsugi — named after the ancient Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold — is a novel about young women breaching boundaries, overcoming trauma, and challenging the social order. And about men surprised by women who are unconventional, unafraid and independent. It is the story of Meena, rebellious and unexamined, and Yuri, as complex as Meena is naive. Of Hajime, outsider to two cultures, and Prakash, unable to see beyond his limited horizons. It is also the story of Haruko who has dedicated herself to her art, and of Leela who is determined to break gender roles and learn the traditional gold-craft of her community. Set between Japan and Jaipur, Kintsugi follows the lives of these characters as they intersect and diverge, collide and break and join again in unexpected ways. The result is a brilliantly original novel as profound as it is playful, as emotionally moving as it is gripping.
Raghu Mehta is a desperate man. His handicraft imports business has unexpectedly collapsed and cash is drying out quickly, his wife thinks he is a loser and society considers him irrelevant. Meanwhile, his closest friends and family all seem to be running flourishing businesses and living luxurious lives in Surat, the diamond capital of India. A trip to China to scout for a new consumer goods business offers a glimmer of hope. But Raghu instead gets sucked into the black-market trade in the back alleys of Beijing. Everything about this new opportunity goes against his god-fearing, vegetarian, middle-class mindset – can he quash his natural instincts to make a success of it? Darkly comical, Made in China is a soul-stirring and thrilling entrepreneurial journey of a man willing to do anything he can to make it big.
A powerful novel about an artist’s mother and her child. I ran away from home and from the shackles of society, family and attachments. I just wanted to live my life, write my novel, follow my passions. I didn’t know that my five-year-old boy had followed me out, but with that realization, Ishwari emerged from within me: a mother, a woman with responsibilities, a woman who was ready to suppress her dreams to protect her son. My son-a child I do not want. ‘Ishwari and Roo wandered the streets at night, looking for a place to stay. A kind old caretaker gave them an empty room on the terrace of a guest house. Ishwari found a job as a caregiver to the handsome gentleman who lived next door, while Roo-her weak, invalid son-was locked up all day in the room on the roof. ‘And I struggle to find my place in this dark novel. I yearn for passion and despair-for that is what makes good literature-while Ishwari seeks a life of joy for herself and her son’. Pulsating with raw energy, Abandon gives voice to the perpetual conflict between life and art.
- Gulab by Annie Zaidi
On a warm, muggy summer’s day, Nikunj is at the cemetery to attend Saira’s burial. Saira, the long-lost love he has been searching for, even though he is married to another woman now. But what are Usman and Parmod doing at her grave? Who are these women – Gulab, Mumtaz – that lay claim to her resting place? This is a love story. But what sort of relationship can you have with a dead person, what sort of future? Ghosts don’t grow old. Or have children. But do we really know? If they can reclaim a body for themselves, perhaps they can cover that body with stretch marks. In the afterlife, possibilities stretch into infinity. Gulab tests the limits that our mind sets upon a ghost’s powers. If you see her as a woman clinging to life, there is not much to fear. Yet: what if she wants to return to your life? And what makes you think you can make her leave? Annie Zaidi brings her characteristically clear-eyed exploration of love to this beguiling, hair-raising ghost story.
- Seduce by Summers Cara & Kelly Leslie
Secret agent Chance Mitchell has craved strong, sexy Natalie ever since they worked together undercover. So he makes a proposition she can’t refuse: all the pleasure she can handle-for one night only. Wickedly Hot by Leslie Kelly Ryan Stoddard can describe Jade Maguire in two words: wickedly hot. But even though Jade turns him on, Ryan can’t be distracted from his mission-to prove the sultry siren is a conniving thief!
Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine. A group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists might record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way. Wondering if, unlike these hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, one-hundred-year-old Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through the twists and turns of his country’s turbulent century – and through his own century of lost love and failed chemistry – and finds his way to an astonishing epiphany of redemption and enlightenment. Set in Bulgaria, a country that, like the author himself, has belonged sometimes to Asia and sometimes to Europe, Solo is a book about lost roots, broken traditions and wasted ambitions – and the depths of lyricism by which human beings overcome those things.
In a post apocalyptic world, small settlements have formed on the outskirts of what used to be north Delhi. Life has regressed to pre-civilization levels. Radiation has ruined the water, made monsters out of rodents and made crops almost impossible to cultivate. In this world, twelve-year-old Natasha, a girl from the East, traumatized by the rape of her sister and utterly silent, stumbles upon a library and its only occupant: Ved. Deciphering the library, their new world, is the only hope they have of saving their families, perhaps their world.
Deceptive, tenacious and sinful, the ‘other woman’ seduces husbands, breaks happy and unhappy marriages by playing the dark temptress. She stands as much on the inside as on the outside of the relationship she infringes upon. As lover, girlfriend or second wife, she is not always in the wrong, though she can often end up becoming a victim. This is the woman, powerful yet powerless, that we encounter in story after story of this unusual collection. Manorama’s many men abandon her the day she falls in love with one man. Maganlal Daruwala initiates Shardabai into prostitution and becomes the richest bidder for first nights to her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. A tribal girl frees Randhir of all inhibitions in a sexual encounter. A man surrenders his body to an older woman as a devotee’s offering to a deity. A visitor from home brings along Suniti’s little secret from the past, thus shattering the calm of her marital life. Incredibly moving tales of love and heartbreak, The Other Woman bring together the many perceptions of love, lust, fidelity, and the enigmatic ‘otherness’ of all women.
- The Returned by Mott Jason
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Razia: a creature of the night and a political player, a well-dressed clubber and a lover of poetry. Hushed voices say she may be hundreds of years old, almost as old as her home: Delhi, the city of tombs, at once majestic and in disarray.Razia is muse and antagonist to DCP Sajan Dayal, whose centuries-old roots lie in bureaucratic service. Assisting Dayal are Kapoor, a legend in the Delhi Police, and an idealistic young cop named Smita Dhingra, who – unlike Kapoor – is from the elite Indian Police Service. As the novel progresses, the officers’ pursuit of a serial collector of fingers quickly spirals into encounters with would-be vampires and werewolves, rampant sexual violence, the political pressures that attend every aspect of life in a capital city – and, at every turn, Razia. A first novel of unusual beauty, Necropolis weaves poetry, brothels, ministers and migrants into a heady, twisted and darkly entertaining tale, peeling back the layers from a city that is simultaneously in thrall to its past, hostage to its present and bitterly divided as to its future.
Powerful and riveting As a young student in pre-Independence Dacca, Ranajit Dutta is relatively untouched by the patriotic fervour gripping the rest of the country. He is suffocated by, and often critical of, the constricted environment and superstitionridden society he lives in. He seeks an escape through poetry and his search for the embodiment of universal womanhood. But one event shakes up his idealism and fundamentally changes his relationships with the women in his life: his first love Mitu Bardhan; his affectionate but neglected aunt Kajol; his revolutionary friend Bulbul; his naive, adoring wife Nalini. A man’s perennial quest for the unattainable, Black Rose also brings alive the heady idealism and the charged years when India was struggling to be free.
Predator is a gory tale of megalomania and obsession, and about the dangers lurking in the shadows of the virtual world. Set against the backdrop of thriving wine industry, this is a dark and gothic story from the author of the ‘Horn OK Please’ series.
A disenchanted wife embarks on a one-night stand… A wheelchair-bound poet comes home to roost, upsetting the balance of his carer’s life. A troubled mother finds solace in an unusual place. A man begins to steal office stationery for no apparent reason. The stories in Shreya Sen-Handley’s Strange are about everyday people whose lives take unforeseen turns. Suddenly, they find themselves drawn inexorably into encounters and situations that weren’t part of their plan, but which result in the shocking revelation of buried parts of their psyches. This is a book that will have you engrossed as you try to guess what happens at the end of each story, and its characters will haunt you for a long time after you’ve turned the last page.
- Exile by Akhilesh & Rajesh Kumar
Suryakant’s life begins to unravel as he is forced to quit his government job. To get temporary financial relief, he decides to work for a Ramjoar Pandey and trace his lineage. The journey takes Suryakant back to Sultanpur, his hometown and his estranged family. The past slips in and out, as in a dream, and the future congeals into a mass of anxiety and fear. Set in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, the men and women in the book are faced with ruthlessness, depravity and an intense loneliness, rising from the overwhelming assault of capitalism and consumerism. Akhilesh’s inventive prose, treads the ground between memory and moment, the states of being and not being, as it follows the lives of ordinary people who discover the thin line that separates freedom from exile. Exile portrays the mortal wounds inflicted by the modern civilization on our soul.
An earthquake exposes the avarice of the town’s survivors; a woman remembers her first erotic experience with a soldier who may not be alive; the generation gap turns upside down when a father’s bid for freedom shocks his adult children; a disembodied narrator attends to unfinished business, returning to earthly life five times, each time in a different avatar. Loot is a startling collection of ten stories, each a mirror of our interior lives.
Sapna Shah is starstruck. Whether it’s seeing visions of lovers dancing hand in hand in exotic locales or picturing herself walking down the red carpet, there is nothing Sapna loves more than spending hour after hour dreaming of the filmi world. She soon finds her chance to turn daydreams into reality when she travels from New York to Mumbai on a magazine assignment, and ends up rubbing more-than-just shoulders with Bollywood’s it-producer Gautam Gupta. Sapna spends the next few weeks searching for fallen eyelashes in actress Zeina Khan’s kohl-lined green eyes, hiding the not-so-discreet evidence of handsome hero Karan Kumar’s multiple affairs and trying to protect porcelain megastar Aradhna Roy from anything that might upset her. But when the mysterious death of a co-worker compels Sapna to look beyond Bollywood’s fairytale empire and into the depths of Mumbai’s notorious underworld, she quickly realizes that there is more to the movies than just song and dance.
A retired schoolteacher in present-day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow-burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue. As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of the nation’s memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect.’ This is a book to cherish for a very long time, for its descriptions and evocations as well as for what it tells us about the ebb and flow of human expectation’
It’s the nineties, and Kashmir is in turmoil. The tourism industry has taken a big hit, and the youth are disillusioned, with no jobs or hopes for the future. In this climate, Malla Khaliq waits day after day for guests to arrive at his three beloved houseboats – Gul, Gulshan and Gulfam – on the Dal Lake, and struggles to keep his three sons together. While Noor Mohammed loves his father, and tries to keep the faith, despite evidence that business is on the decline, Ghulam Ahmed and Ghulam Qadir have plans that might place them in the path of danger. Meanwhile, as Khaliq prepares for his much-pampered daughter Parveen’s wedding, the sudden arrival of a mysterious American girl sets in motion events that threaten to disturb the precarious equilibrium of his household. Gul Gulshan Gulfam paints a portrait of a Kashmir in transition, and of a man who is trying to salvage the memories and values of his youth. Once a popular television series, this novelization vividly recreates the streets of Srinagar and the once-living economy of the Dal lake. This is a deeply affecting story about relationships, migration, ambitions and dreams of preserving one’s homeland.
I see you. Legs like toothpicks, body and face all ribs and cheekbones. And that hair. Come on, what is it? Like friggin’ barbed wire. I see you with a hand-me-down cracked bat creaming a leather ball, in a sock, hanging from the branch of a mango tree. Being accepted into an elite international school on a cricket scholarship doesn’t mean your life is going to change. Except it does, because hunky Indika – I for Indika, I for Incredible – takes you under his wing, drags you to posh restaurants and shows you pictures from glossy magazines of women who … well, never mind, that’s not the point. The point is: if your best friend snogs your girlfriend, can he still be Incredible? Was he ever? But don’t sweat the small stuff. There are cricket matches to win, examinations to pass, a horrifying past to forget, a sinister schoolmaster to avoid … and, of course, a first kiss to finally experience. Prabu’s life is never going to be the same again. Funny, diamond-sharp and unapologetic, Panther is a novel about that familiar, fractured passage to adulthood that can make us magnificent if it does not kill us.
- Tempted by Hart Megan
I was left with the feeling of having discovered something I’ve always wanted without ever having known that this is what I’ve been missing. You want him, You’re married. What would you do? I had everything a woman could want. My husband, James, the house on the lake. Our perfect life and then Alex came to visit. The first time I saw my husband’s best friend, I didn’t like him. Didn’t like how his penetrating eyes followed me everywhere. Didn’t like how James changed when he was around. But that didn’t stop me from wanting him. It was meant to be fun, something the three of us shared through those hot summer weeks Alex stayed with us. Nobody was supposed to fall in or out of love. After all, we had a perfect life and I loved my husband but I wasn’t the only one.
Easterine Kire brings to life for the first time the authentic voice of the Naga people amidst the horror of the war that overwhelmed their mountaintop home in 1944. It is a voice which has for too long been silent. In her vibrant telling of the story, Easterine shows just what it meant for Nagas to be refugees in their own homeland, their homes and livelihoods around them crushed by the weight of conflict and bloodshed, their families split up and separated forever.’ – Robert Lyman, military historian ‘Even if you haven’t read about or heard of the Battle of Kohima, which stopped the Japanese march into India, you will never forget the battle after reading this book. It is based on Mari’s living memory and a diary she kept during and after the war. Vic, Mari and Pat show by example that it is by living passionately and loving unreservedly that we give depth and meaning to the scattered events and accidents of our lives. Mari and the people around her love deeply, and that sees them through life and death.’ – Paulus Pimomo, Professor of English & Co-Director, African and Black Studies, Central Washington University ‘Easterine’s writings are pivoted on her yearning for truth and grace, enveloped at the same time in the existential human predicament.
The son of a former militant, Fayaz is an aimless bureaucrat whose marriage to his wife Zeenat has broken down. His nephew Imran is a young student, a misfit in Srinagar, hoping to join a new kind of spectacular resistance. Shireen, the granddaughter of a spy, discovers how her painful and divisive family story is deeply intertwined with the history of Kashmir. The paths of these characters intersect and diverge in Nitasha Kaul’s tour de force novel Future Tense, which traces the competing trajectories of modernity and tradition, freedom and suffocation, and the possibility of bridging the stories of different kinds of Kashmiris.
A systems administrator uncovers a government plot to deport him. A nine-year-old boy tries to make sense of a less-than-special world. A woman discovers life is no romance novel. A teenager flees the nets of family. A housekeeper wakes up from the American dream. A college student brings a poem to life. A paperless songwriter is forced to become a hero. A doctor diagnoses her own terminal condition: motherhood. An IT engineer’s protocols fail to match that of his wife’s. A retired teacher in a foreign land turns pioneer. A woman linked to them all discovers new worlds.
This is the story of Bhima, the second son, always second in line — a story never adequately told until one of India’s finest writers conjured him up from the silences in Vyasa’s narrative. M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Bhima is a revelation — lonely, eager to succeed, treated with a mixture of affection and contempt by his Pandava brothers, and with scorn and hatred by his Kaurava cousins, Bhima battles incessantly with failure and disappointment. He is adept at disguising his feelings but has an overwhelmingly intuitive understanding of everyone who crosses his path. A warrior without equal, he takes on the mighty Bakasura and Jarasandha, and ultimately Duryodhana, thus bringing the Great War to a close. However, all of Bhima’s moments of triumph remain unrecognized and unrewarded. If his mother saw glory only in the skills of Arjuna and the wisdom of Yudhishtira, his beloved Draupadi cared only for the beauteous Arjuna.
Rakesh Ahuja, a government minister in New Delhi, is beset by problems: thirteen children and another on the way; a wife who mourns the loss of her favourite TV star; and a teenaged son with some really strong opinions about family planning. To make matters worse, looming over this comical farrago are secrets – both personal and political – that threaten to push the Ahuja household into disastrous turmoil. Following father and son as they blunder their way across the troubled landscape of New Delhi, Karan Mahajan brilliantly captures the frenetic pace of India’s capital city to create a searing portrait of modern family life.
Mehtas ChoiceHarsh Mehta seems to be going great guns with his company Mehta Housing Ltd poised to become the next big thing in real estate. Till a series of reckless decisions by his trusted colleagues, of which he is quite unaware, take the company on a downward spiral and he realizes to his horror that he is on the brink of bankruptcy, confronted with the choice of either filing for insolvency or fighting it out. With his reputation at stake, he chooses to embark on a painstaking and arduous struggle not only to turn around his company but also salvage his honour among his clients and restore his self-esteem. Suhas Mantri presents a riveting corporate tale that would be of special interest to anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to survive in business.
Denis McGowan left India for Hong Kong to make his fortune. As the years passed and his printing press prospered, he lost touch with home. But as news of Hong Kong’s impending handover by Britain to China trickles in, McGowan’s stable life seems suddenly uncertain. And it stirs up his memory, filling him with nostalgic ache for his village in India. That’s when young Robin McGowan decides to travel to the village his father speaks of so often: McCluskieganj, an Anglo-Indian agricultural haven founded in the 1940s in what is now Jharkhand. Only, when he gets there, he finds that the village is nothing like the idyllic home of his father’s childhood. Overrun by outlaws, riddled with politics and controlled by land mafia, this is not the place where the nature-loving tribals had once peacefully co-existed with the Anglo-Indians who chose India over Britain in 1947. This is a true-to-life portrait of an extraordinary village.
A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland.
A short, fascinating novel set in the Bombay of the 1970s, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Scene: 75 is a crazy kaleidoscope of stories within stories populated by a cast of extraordinary and memorable – but also cynical and manipulative – characters, from struggling directors and wealthy lesbians to film-obsessed social climbers and sleazy producers. In this irreverent, surreal, deeply satirical and darkly humorous work, the author’s biting prose takes an unflinching look at both Hindu-Muslim and class relations, as well as at how human ties corrode and wither because of ambition and self-interest. Superbly translated by Poonam Saxena, this lost classic from Rahi Masoom Raza rips off the tinsel curtain that hides the film industry’s hypocrisy, insecurity and desperation for success. It is a novel that will delight and disturb in equal measure.
1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilization, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate. The question is: what will be left when the twelve years of the experiment are over? Which child will be master, and which the slave? For surely one will triumph over the other. Or will they all, children and scientists alike, reap the fruits of breaking the taboo, as they discover love and loneliness on the wild but beautiful island of Arlinda.
Belt up and hold on tight. Ravan and Eddie are back in another zany ride that takes them from anonymity to fame. Yes, R&E or E&R, as they are known in Bollywood, have made it to the top as music directors. But they have neither lost sight of the big dream, nor forgotten their past struggles. Ravan and Eddie are determined to become superstars even if they have to produce the damn film themselves. From the glitz and glamour of Bollywood to the badlands of Chambal, from the high-rises of tony Pali Hill to Indian literature’s most famous chawl address, CWD Chawl No. 17, from air-kissing high society to gun-wielding mafia bosses, Ravan and Eddie muddle along from one catastrophe to another, without ever losing their trademark sangfroid. Poverty and life have taught them to reinvent themselves every time there’s a crisis. Keeping them company through it all are old friends like Granna, Parvatibai, Violet, Pieta, Belle and Asmaan, and new ones like Mrs Venkatraman, the dacoit Maan Singh, and Jagannath, the son of Three Point One. As bawdy and entertaining as Ravan and Eddie, as exuberant and over-the-top as The Extras, yet possessing a hard, cold edge, Rest in Peace is a fitting finale to the trilogy featuring Indian fiction’s most epic characters.
Taboo, desire and a dead woman’s saris layer the lives of women who board together in a widow’s household. A cinema fan encounters his idol and the cruel, fragile world that creates and holds her. A child wonders if the discarded siblings who had once lain next to her in a petri dish were touched by the family bond that she struggles to make sense of. Lovers decide to float away into a world where the disappointments of domesticity and stale love can never touch them. A woman, resisting her family’s pressure to produce heirs must confront a primal need to bear children. Polymorphism presents nineteen stories that shift realities and twist perceptions and veer on the edge of strange, slipstream, speculative fiction. The vulnerabilities and the wild, visceral anxieties of the characters that populate the stories come alive under the empathy they evoke. Textured by the author’s scientific research on biological molecules and deeply informed by family stories, the collection explores humanity’s driving obsessions of life, fertility and relationships with tender, surreal expression.
Meet Dillon, a high-functioning mess with a rather inconvenient foot fetish, who has been keeping some very big secrets from his girlfriend Ramona. Also, meet Dhilan, a young carer caught in an endless loop of pre-bereavement bereavement for his dying mother. And then there is Dylan. The less said about him the better. These three very separate identities for the same young man have been growing dangerously hardwired thanks to the self-reinforcing effects of social media and search engines, and the uncanny predictive capabilities of his smartphones. When two men threaten to expose Dillon/Dhilan/Dylan, he is forced to unravel a gut-wrenching mystery that he would rather leave well alone.
Mohan Rakesh was a towering figure in Hindi fiction and drama. More than a decade in the making, and put together in collaboration with the author, this volume makes a broad range of his work available to English readers. The stories here range from humorous, satirical studies of human foibles, to profound, painful commentaries on the complexities of the human condition. A translation of Adhe Adhure, the play that thrust Indian drama into modernity and one of the finest ever written in Hindi, is included as well. Rounding out the book, as part of the ‘P.S. Section’, are a self-portrait and interview – rare, first-person statements by the author, and among the most important critical sources for his work. This is an essential volume for anyone interested in the changing landscape of post-Independence Hindi literature.
Jenny Kent has been living her life as Bella Rossini-and ruthless tycoon Dante Rossini has come to take Bella home. Discovering Jenny’s innocent deception, he insists she visit Capri. He drapes her in designer dresses and diamonds; as a Rossini, she has a public role to play-as well as the private arrangement Dante is demanding? Joined by a Promise Italian playboy Marco Marcolini has decided that, for baby Molly’s sake, her nanny Sabrina must accept his proposal. He thinks he’s marrying an experienced gold-digger-when in fact his forced bride is as pure and unblemished as the diamonds that bind her!
Rehan Tabassum has grown up in a world of privilege in Delhi. His mother and her new husband embody the dazzling emergent India everyone is talking about. His real father, however, is a virtual stranger to him: a Pakistani Muslim who lives across the border and owns a vast telecommunications empire called Qasimic Call. As Rehan contemplates his future, he finds himself becoming unmoored. Leaving the familiarity of home for Pakistan in an attempt to get closer to his father, he is drawn into events he barely understands. His half-brother, Isffy, is being blackmailed; his powerful father’s entourage is tearing itself apart; and the city of Port Bin Qasim, where he finds himself, is filled with rioting protestors. Moral danger lurks in every corner of this dark, shifting, and unfamiliar world. Set against the backdrop of a turbulent Pakistan and a rapidly changing India, Noon is a startling and powerfully charged novel from a brilliant young writer. Aatish Taseer bears witness to some of the most urgent questions of our times, questions about nationhood and violence, family and identity.
Why would a woman who has everything take her own life? Kranti, an Indian woman fashion designer in Paris, commits suicide. She leaves two notebooks and some paintings behind. Her lover, Robert-Pierre, a psychiatrist who is married and has managed to keep his two lives separate, tries to make sense of Kranti’s death, just as his own life begins to unravel…What terrible secrets lie hidden in the pages of her notebooks? Did they drive her to take her own life? Fast-paced and vividly written, this novel, which moves seamlessly between India and Paris, keeps the reader on tenterhooks right up to the last shattering page.
Time is arguably our biggest enemy. And memory, perhaps, our greatest curse. Which makes forgetting the hardest thing to do. These are stories of difficult pasts, and the struggle to leave them behind. Identical-twin rickshaw drivers are wrongly suspected of terrorism in paranoid Bombay; a Calcutta merchant envies each saree he sells for the intimacy it’ll share with the woman who buys it; an illicit love affair is conducted over nine potent text messages; a lonely astronaut sings out loud, hoping his voice will find an ear somewhere; adivasis, jawans, Naxalites, policemen and journalists in Orissa are caught in a web of violence unleashed on them by both their own histories and that of a nation helplessly repeating it. Forty-nine tales speak of the power of forgetting.
- Pawn by Carter Aimee
Are you more than the Number on the back of your Neck? For Kitty Doe, it seems like an easy choice. She can either spend her life as a III in misery, looked down upon by the higher ranks and forced to leave the people she loves, or she can become a VII and join the most powerful family in the country. If she says yes, Kitty will be Masked, surgically transformed into Lila Hart, the Prime Minister’s niece, who died under mysterious circumstances. As a member of the Hart family, she will be famous. She will be adored and for the first time, she will matter. There’s only one catch. She must also stop the rebellion that Lila secretly fostered – the same one that got her killed and one Kitty believes in. Faced with threats, conspiracies and a life that’s not her own, she must decide which path to choose and learn how to become more than a pawn in a twisted game she’s only beginning to understand.
What would you do if the world were about to end? She is running on dream walkways into the day that will dawn bright, like any other, hanging by a thread on a piece of news, a pendulum swinging from now to then, before to after, panic to peace to panic, capital to city, city to suburb, remembering to forgetting…In the course of twenty-four hours, nine characters across five cities are faced with a pressing need to examine their past. As each of them confronts the realities within, the world itself explodes into chaos, the disintegration of civic order mirroring the breakdown of individual sanities. A powerful first novel from a critically acclaimed poet, translator and fiction-writer, Rupture is a book in which every word, every emotion, resonates with a heightened sense of intensity. Sampurna Chattarji brings to her writing a poetry and potency that is rare, and the sheer pace of the narrative pulls the reader in with its urgency.
Zeeshan Haq, a handsome Kashmiri lad, is forced to relocate to Mumbai after losing his father in a mysterious fire that destroys their ancestral photo studio in Srinagar. With ambitions to become a successful photographer, Zeeshan joins his maternal uncle in the running of a small agency that supplies paparazzi pictures to Mumbai’s tabloids and newspapers. That is his introduction to the seductive, dazzling, often hedonistic world of Mumbai high-society. Zeeshan is instantly smitten by Hazel Haroon, a model and aspiring Bollywood film star, and yearns to vault over the red velvet rope that separates the paparazzo from his glamorous subjects. Soon enough, he succeeds in becoming chief assistant to Kabir Kohli, Mumbai’s most celebrated fashion photographer.
Welcome to a world where you are author, creator and, of course, Sachin Tendulkar. In this novel, the reader takes up the guise of the famous cricketer and sets forth on a philosophical journey like no other. Told in a light, engaging voice, the story moves from a single incident – the interview of a prospective candidate for the position of a college principal – to larger speculations about life, the universe and the great game known as existence. Sachin – witty, sharp and observant – functions as a guide on this metaphysical, fantastical journey from the everyday of a college ground to the larger ground of life.
‘Are there people you know who are not words?’ A cancer survivor wreaks vengeance on the world, a builder erects the Taj Mahal of public toilets, a woman buys a treadmill for her depressed pet, a husband’s life is hijacked by his wife’s nightmares, a matrimonial advertisement says it like it really is. Autoplay explores the futuristic, semi-dystopian Hindu Aryan Republic of India. G. Sampath’s stories work at the level of the pre-conscious, verbal kites waving their never-ending tails in the sky of consciousness. Through a minute rendering of feeling-states, he explores a whole range of emotional landscapes, from melancholy and mirth to rage and disgust. This is adventurous new fiction, exploring the themes of marriage, adolescence, love, terrorism, technology, consumerism and other familiars through feeling-eyes.
Ray had it all worked out. Go to India, take care of his father and return to his life in San Jose. His father would follow him in a couple of months and that would be that. But his father dies and Ray attributes it to bad luck. Things take a bizarre turn when an old friend tells him the reason behind his father’s death. Ray finds himself drawn into the seedy under-belly of Tamil films and up against a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Should Ray go back to his meticulously constructed life in the US? Or should he throw all plans aside and take on the man responsible for breaking into his father’s heart and stealing his mind? Jump Cut is a genre-defying page-turner that is at once funny, moving and suspenseful, all leading to a deliciously satisfying climax with a sting in its tail.
‘Sanjay Chopra is a storyteller like those of the old days, yet he is as modern as tomorrow. Each story leaves you with a thirst for more.’ – Meghnad Desai
What really happened when the impetuous young Alexander met King Darius III of the mighty Persian Empire in 331 BC? Who was the nineteen-year-old hacker who rewrote the rules of the Indo-Pak conflict? What strange facts must bestselling author Preeti Mishra confront when she collaborates with her deaf-mute sister Pari on a new novel? Combining history and fantasy, and cutting a wide arc through space and time, Talespin is a collection of stories unconstrained by convention. Here, hired killers, big game hunters and Mughal damsels entice you into their world, the sixteenth century meshes comfortably with the twenty-first, and the war of Troy seems as real as World War II. Sanjay Chopra’s vivid prose mythologizes history and makes believable the mythic. In the intrigue-filled world that he creates, the past and present conspire to ensure that the next spin is only a page away.
Medhasri Sen was at war with the woman everyone thought she was. No one knows until, to everyone’s surprise, she kills herself. Her brothers are secretly relieved: abandoned by her husband for her strange, unpredictable ways, she had been nothing but an embarrassment and a responsibility. But her suicide tears up the placid life of her journalist nephew, Satya, who discovers that before her death. Medha had laid for him a trail of clues that led him to places no one ever knew she had been. In each place, Satya finds stories and artworks she had hidden and it slowly dawns on him that he is rescuing the life-work of a genius. In doing so, he learns how dangerously close he is himself to the abyss that has swallowed her up.
Yasmeen Khalil is beautiful and charming. She is also unpredictable, enigmatic, funny and tragic. One day she vanishes, leaving behind a heartbroken husband and a desolate daughter. Irenie refuses to accept that Yasmeen is gone; she haunts the house with the scents and sounds of her dazzling mother in an effort to maintain the illusion of her presence. Five years after her mother’s disappearance, Irenie discovers a box of letters, beautiful, intimate love letters, which reveal a different Yasmeen, a woman who, all her life, was in love with a man named Ahmed. Why did the two never get together? What really happened to Yasmeen? On a quest for answers that she suspects her father James has long suppressed, she travels to Islamabad, where she uncovers a trove of secrets for which she may not be ready. Over the course of a summer, father and daughter find that they must help each other move out of Yasmeen’s shadow and forge their own stories.
‘A riveting novel about the publishing industry.’ – The Hindu
In the early years of the twenty first century, sweeping change is taking place in the publishing industry. Ill-equipped to handle the transformation of their world, a number of publishing houses struggle to survive. One of these is Litmus, an independent firm in the UK. The onus of ensuring that the company remains viable falls upon its publisher, Zachariah Thomas, who also edits its most successful author, Massimo Sepp Unfortunately for Zach and for Litmus, Seppi dies unexpectedly. Without its star writer, Litmus, chances of surviving the economic downturn are slim. To keep his company intact and to give it room to regroup and chart out a strategy for the future, Zach must, among other things, try to mine the Seppi legacy for one last gem. By turns compelling and thought-provoking, this novel by one of the industry’s foremost figures masterfully depicts the exhilarating and surprisingly turbulent world of book publishing.
Even before Indian writing in English became the fashionable thing it is today, Nayantara Sahgal was a name to reckon with internationally. In Day of Reckoning: Stories, her first collection of short stories, one finds a familiar engagement with society, human rights and politics, and a Sahgalesque subversive take on tradition. A foreign journalist tries to make sense of a rapidly changing India even as a leading political leader is assassinated in public; a Naxalite who believes in scientific killing of the class enemy and the cult of violence is shattered when it boomerangs on him; a favourite aunt assigned the task of getting her young nephew back to India from London for an arranged marriage finds more than she had bargained for. This is a thought-provoking, yet disturbing collection of stories from a master storyteller. Brimming with rare insights on the human condition and informed by the changing political and cultural ambience of the nation, Day of Reckoning is a must-have addition to every library.
- Goddess of Fire by Kirchner Bharti
Seventeen-year-old Moorti stands in front of her middle-aged husband’s funeral pyre, fearing the two brothers-in-law who will push her into it. Even as she is at the edge of despair and hysteria, Moorti is rescued by the dashing Job Charnock who was passing by on his ship. Charnock, an agent of the British East India Company, whisks Moorti away to his settlement. There, the young woman gets a new lease of life as Maria, as well as job employment and shelter in Charnock’s factory. As the months roll by, Charnock falls in love with the feisty, intelligent, driven woman Maria blossoms into – an affection she returns in full. But the going isn’t easy for the couple. Forced into exile, they retreat to Hooghly, along the banks of the Ganges. Here Maria dreams of building a small settlement for the people living in the villages nearby. Will her dream come true? Will she able to give the villagers a good life, work opportunities and financial stability?
These charming portraits of young girls living far from home, ‘secure’ in their illicit relationships, of young men full of RSS swagger, of old women waiting late in the night for their grown-up children to come home, capture the lives of ordinary people in vivid and varied hues. Spread across the socio-economic spectrum, these stories are like snapshots of interesting faces in a crowd; faces around whom the author deftly sketches lives and longings, pet ideas and prejudices, loves and hates with bold, confident strokes. From ‘Ganesha’, the story of a middle-class housewife waiting for her son to return at night and thinking of her other son who died in a road accident, to ‘A Game of Cards’ about a young urban woman sunning herself on the beach, these pithy sketches are a colourful montage of modern Indian life.
One man’s quest for his roots reveals a complex maze of relationships A mysterious letter from a hundred-year-old Englishman. A body found on the railway tracks in an Indian gold mining town. An Australian journalist’s trip to the abandoned Kolar Gold Fields. What connects these random events? Colour of Gold moves back and forth over the decades, in the process unravelling the secrets of a sleepy little town which in its heyday boasted the richest gold mines in India. White men and their white wives and Indian mistresses, Indian officers who tread the fine line between their traditional upbringing and Western lifestyle, men and women who fall in love and lust across boundaries of class and race – all come alive in this fascinating saga spanning a century.
In the sleepy by-lanes of 1980s’ Calcutta, a young boy spends hours in front of the mirror, draped in his mother’s saris, his face layered with make-up, as he dances and twirls around the room. Often, when he dances, he catches a glimpse of a face that is his and not quite his. His mother is ashamed of her effeminate son; his friends tease him about his eccentricities; and Moyur grows up an unwitting outcast, misunderstood by all but his friend and neighbour, Jonali. Sensitive and evocative, this promising debut novel tells the story of Moyur, the boy who never quite fits in, and that of his twin sister Moyna, who died before she was born.
1857: Eighteen-year-old Margaret Wheeler, daughter of General Wheeler, is kidnapped during the uprising. 1997: Eighteen-year-old Delhi schoolgirl Tara Fernandez is kidnapped and murdered. Two crimes of passion separated by 140 years, but bound by strange similarities. In 2013, Tara’s little sister, Pia, is a young aspiring novelist, investigating the curious story of Margaret, one of the first known ‘victims’ of Stockholm Syndrome. She married the soldier who had kidnapped her during the 1857 massacres, and went on to live, seemingly happily, as a Muslim. When Pia stumbles upon Margaret’s private journal and letters, she finally begins to understand how it might have been possible for her to fall in love with her captor. But the more compelling question before Pia is whether her sister might have been similarly in love. Why else did she not return home when she clearly had the chance? But, if she had been in love, why was she eventually killed? Moving gracefully between the gruelling summer of 1850s’ Kanpur and the leaden grey winter of modern-day Delhi, Jaishree Misra weaves an intriguing tale of danger and violence and the human capacity for hope.
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