Garv Roy Gill and Yahvi Kothari meet at an airport lounge by chance. Six months later they find themselves consumed by the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. Bored with their mundane daily routine, their adventurous streak makes them decide, one day, to escape the present and begin a new reality somewhere far, far away. Just that the day they are supposed to meet and escape, Yahvi doesn’t turn up. Then she doesn’t respond to Garv’s phone calls or messages. And mysteriously Yahvi vanishes altogether.
Days later, as a grieving Garv stumbles upon her Instagram profile, which he didn’t know existed, he is shocked to realize that her every post is probably a clue to the truth behind her disappearance. Except, the more he unearths the meandering truth, the more he learns about a certain side of Yahvi which changes the way he saw her. And the way he understood love.
Cross Your Heart, Take My Name is a beguiling tale about urban loneliness, fickle relationships and our need for companionship as depicted by the twisted journey of two individuals, caught up in their own emotional plight, blurring the lines between crime and sin.
A policeman, a criminal overlord, a film star, beggars, cultists, spies and terrorists-the lives of the privileged, the famous, the wretched and the bloodthirsty interweave with cataclysmic consequences amid the chaos of modern-day Mumbai in this soaring, uncompromising and unforgettable epic masterwork of literary art.
Aum is under attack. The enemies are not external; rather, they are within the kingdom, each obsessed with the Crown of Seven Stars. Early one morning, Destiny rolls her dice. General Saahas, heir to the throne, becomes a hunted man and Aum plunges into chaos, submitting meekly to the tyranny of the self-appointed Raja Shunen and the wily Queen Manmaani.
Turned into a fugitive, Saahas is forced to submit to the power of the saade saati–the dreaded seven and a half years befalling every person at least once in their lifetime. Bitter and full of despair, he vows to vanquish his biggest foe, Destiny.
Rolling the dice once more, Destiny prepares to bend Saahas to her will. She, not Saahas, must decide the winner of the Crown of Seven Stars.
Govinda Shauri always has a plan.
Govinda, son of Nanda-one of the many cowherds in the verdant kingdom of Surasena, in Aryavarta-was content with his tough but wonderful life. That was until the king’s men came looking for him and his brother, Balabadra, spewing death and destruction in their wake.
Forced to leave behind those they love in order to save them, the brothers are now on the run-all the while being hunted by the tyrant king, Kans, and his bloodthirsty adviser, Chanuran, who will stop at nothing to kill them.
Even as their journey reveals Govinda’s true identity as a prince and the rightful heir to the Surasena crown, it pulls them deeper into the murky secrets surrounding the throne-and its bloody legacy.
What will it take for an ordinary cowherd boy to grow into a master strategist who will always have a plan?
There’s blood in the sand as Raj, Nagi and Madhuri fight to keep a dangerous weapons cache out of the hands of home-grown terrorists. When the IB and private eye Rekha Dixit cross paths on the trail of an underworld kingpin in Rajasthan, sparks fly, threatening war across the borders. It’s yet another dynamite-packed thriller for the Bollywood Knights until a beautiful starlet gets caught in the crossfire.Shoot the Falcon, the third book featuring the teen detectives from Mumbai’s dazzling film world, the Bollywood Knights, is a roller-coaster ride through the romantic and treacherous dunes of remote Rajasthan. Thrilling, action-packed and thoroughly entertaining, this is one book you will find hard to put down until you reach the final spine-chilling shoot-out.
Five years ago, Arjun Kadam was a cop, a rising star in the ranks of the Mumbai Encounter Squad. A tragic event sends him spiralling into depression and drug abuse and Kadam is reduced to a pale shadow of his former self when he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run that also claims the life of a street urchin. Waking from a month-long coma, Kadam is determined to catch the culprit. He’s rapidly sucked into the deep, dark heart of Mumbai, from the glitzy tinsel of Bollywood to the dank depths of the Mumbai Underworld, where the line between the police and the criminals has been blurred beyond recognition. Obsessed with his mission, Kadam sets off a desperate gambit of deadly intrigue and deception that pits him against the very machine of violence and corruption he once helped create.
Maya Haque-outspoken, passionate, headstrong-has been estranged from her brother Sohail for almost a decade. When she returns home to Dhaka hoping for reconciliation, she discovers he has transformed beyond recognition. Can the two, both scarred by war, come together again? And what of Sohail’s young son, Zaid, caught between worlds but desperate to belong? The Good Muslim is an extraordinary novel about faith, family and the long shadow of war.
‘I now realize that leaving home was a gesture, like goodbye notes from failed suicides.’
Amit Ray leaves his upper-class home in India with nine books in his bag and seventy rupees in his pocket, beginning his journey into ‘Life’. His story runs a hectic course, from Calcutta to New Delhi and, after a poignant and disastrous Italian interlude, on to London whores, scatological misadventures, Paris, København and back to London. In-between he works variously as a shoeshine boy, cub reporter, lavatory attendant, engineer and writer. The twentieth-century Odysseus, Amit is obsessed with that contraband comestible?Woman. Adam-and-Eve confrontations lead the hero into situations which are in turn lurid, erotic, pathetic, tender and sometimes outrageously hilarious.
Like a beaver, Amit noses his way into that elusive enclave, the ‘Hampstead intellectual circuit’, and learns of the tribal customs, unspoken dogmas and ambiguous hostilities of fellow humans who would feign to know all the answers. And like the proverbial cork, he bobs up and down but never sinks. At the end of the story we find him packing his bags to revisit the land of his birth. There is a hint of thirst quenched. But if we have come to know the hero at all, we must assume that it is only a calm before another storm.
GUL HAS SPENT HER LIFE RUNNING. She has a star-shaped birthmark on her arm, and in the kingdom of Ambar, girls with such birthmarks have been disappearing for years. In fact, it is this very mark that caused her parents’ murder at the hand of King Lohar’s ruthless soldiers and forced her into hiding in order to protect her own life. So when a group of rebel women called the ‘Sisters of the Golden Lotus’ rescue her, take her in, and train her in warrior magic, Gul wants only one thing: revenge. Cavas lives in the tenements, and he’s just about ready to sign his life over to the king’s army. His father is terminally ill but Cavas will do anything to save him. Sparks fly when he meets a mysterious girl-Gul-in the capital’s bazaar. As the chemistry between them grows undeniably, he becomes entangled in a mission of vengeance and discovers a magic he never expected to find. Dangerous circumstances bring Gul and Cavas together at the king’s domain in Ambar Fort . . . a world with secrets deadlier than their own. Inspired by medieval India, this is the first in a stunning fantasy duology by Tanaz Bhathena, exploring identity, class struggles and high-stakes romance against a breathtaking magical backdrop.
Set in the backdrop of the uprising against the
armed forces in Kashmir in the late 1980s, Lost in Terror
is the tale of a young, educated, career-conscious woman
who finds herself sucked into a maelstrom of death and
destruction. She also cherishes the dream of Azadi and plays
strong to face the wrath of the security forces. But when she
uncovers her husband’s discreet links with gunmen who have
become obsessed with the dream of Azadi at the expense of
the family’s security, she becomes fragile and begins to lose
her hold on her home, her relationships and Azadi itself.
When her dreams for a perfect family and a thriving
career are turned upside down and her life comes to
a standstill, fate offers her a leap of faith-but will she take it?
