Can you really forget your first love?
Rehaan is a hard-working and down-to-earth kind of guy. When he moves to London, he is hopeful to meet his childhood love, Zynah, whom he hasn’t been able to forget even after all these years.
It turns out that Zynah is just the same, just as he remembers her-fun-loving, adventurous and beautiful.
However, there is just one small difference-she is getting married.
What will Rehaan do-risk ruining their friendship and tell her he loves her or let her marry the man she has chosen?
Catagory: Literature & Fiction
House with a Thousand Stories, The
It is 2002 and young Pablo, a city boy who has mostly lived a sheltered and privileged life in Guwahati, is visiting his ancestral village for his aunt’s wedding. This is his second time in Mayong, in rural Assam, since 1998, when he had come for a few days to attend his father’s best friend’s funeral. As the wedding preparations gather pace, Pablo is amused as well as disturbed by squabbling aunts, dying grandmothers, cousins planning to elope for love and hysterical gossips. And on this heady theatre of tradition and modernity hovers the sinister shadow of insurgency and the army’s brutal measures to quell militancy. In the days leading up to the wedding, which ends in an unspeakable tragedy, Pablo finds first love, discovers family intrigues and goes through an extraordinary rite of passage. Written with clinical precision, this gripping first novel announces the arrival of one of the most original voices from India’s North-East.
Vichhoda
The year is 1950; the Liaquat-Nehru Pact has been signed between India and Pakistan; she doesn’t know it will change her life forever; it will also make her stronger
Bibi Amrit Kaur’s life is literally torn apart in the 1947 riots. She’s now in a different country with a different identity. She accepts this new life gracefully and begins a new chapter. She gets married and has two children. Life, however, has something else in store for her. It breaks her apart. Again.
This time the pain is unbearable.
But the hope that she will reunite with her children and be whole again keeps her alive. And she doesn’t let the bitterness cloud her days, becoming a beacon of hope and courage for all.
From the bestselling author of Calling Sehmat comes another hitherto untold story of strength, sacrifice and resilience.
A must read.
Cow and Company
A brave and hilarious debut set in colonial India, Cow and Company begins with the British Chewing Gum Company setting up shop in Bombay with the mission of introducing chewing gum in the colonies. They declare paan, which is in all mouths at all times, as their enemy. A cow is chosen as the mascot. It is up on all the posters.
Religious sentiments are hurt. What begins as a search for a cow ends up in a catastrophe. With laugh-out-loud moments, ingenious use of language, and a spellbinding interplay of fantasy and myth, Cow and Company uses satire to take stock of the state of the nation, religion and capital, then and now.
Adultery
Linda, in her thirties, begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody’s eyes, she has a perfect life: happy marriage, children, and a career. Yet what she feels is an enormous sense of dissatisfaction. All that changes when she encounters a successful politician who had, years earlier, been her high-school boyfriend. As she rediscovers the passion missing from her life, she will face a life-altering choice.
Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2019
‘And then finally I felt sadness, aided perhaps by those futile notes, by the dust that keeps thickening, by the untouchable past, the inevitable future, and by everything else that pushes us around.’
Ib lives with his schizophrenic father and his ‘nice’ mother negotiating life, not knowing what to do, steered by uncaring winds and pushy people. From his slimy, unmiraculous birth to the tragic death of a loved one, Ib wanders the city, from one thing to another, confused, lost and alone, all the while reflecting on his predicament. He is searching for something-what he does not know-and must overcome many obstacles: family, religion, love and, finally, death. Will he be defeated by ‘this wreckage of modern life?’ Will a mysterious woman lift him out of the ‘cement’ in his soul?
In this journey of sadness and self-reflection, Ib tranforms into an ordinary man from an ordinary boy and along the way, tries to figure out life and understand himself.
In this audacious debut that is insightful, original and deeply disturbing, Roshan Ali’s play of language is nothing less than masterful.
Kanthapura
‘The first literary manifesto to point to an Indian way of appropriating the English language’
-Guardian
Regarded as the first major Indian novel in English, Kanthapura is the story of how Gandhi’s struggle for Independence came to a casteist south Indian village. Young Moorthy, back from the city, brimming with new ideas, seeks to cut across ancient barriers and unite the villagers in non-violent action. The story emerges through the eyes of a delightful old woman, who comments on the villagers’ actions with sharp-eyed wisdom, evoking the spirit of India’s traditional folk epics.
‘The finest novel to come out of India in recent years’
-E.M. Forster
The Serpent And The Rope
‘Lyrical, fluid, colloquial’—The New York Times
Rama, a young scholar, meets Madeleine at a university in France. Though they seem to be made for each other, both alike in temperament and character, at times they are divided, a huge gulf separating them. Rama’s trip back to India for his father’s illness forcibly reminds him of the underlying contrasts between India and Europe, and of a certain conflict between them in himself. When he returns to France, Rama and Madeleine must face the problems in their marriage. Can they preserve their identities, or must one sacrifice one’s inheritance to make the relationship a success?
‘More than any other writer of his generation [Rao] established the status of Indian literature in English’—The Hindu
Qahar
Vimal promised himself that he would move to Delhi and live a normal life as a family man with his wife and child; erasing every memory of his haunting past. He promised to forget that he had spent his life scraping bloody words into the wall of time.
But one day, a whirlwind puts a sudden end to the calm before the storm and he is blown away like a twig. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself in that place where he promised never to venture again.
So All Is Peace
But sit down, breathe deep, and ask a woman. Any woman. They are there.
When twin sisters Layla and Tanya are found starving in their upmarket apartment, there is frenzy in the media. How often does one find two striking, twenty-something women, one half-dead, the other not speaking, living in a state of disrepair and chaos, for no apparent reason? Theories about them are rampant, but disillusioned journalist Raman is loath to follow the story. That is, until Tanya begins to talk to him, and the darker truth behind the sisters’ lives starts to unravel.
A richly atmospheric, deeply claustrophobic story with a stunning denouement, of two women confronting the everyday realities of their city and country, So all is Peace provides an unflinching insight into love, lust, fear, grief, and the decisions we make, through a cast of sharply drawn characters brought together by an unspoken wrong.