Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—”the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional, mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, hoping to become rich like the other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.
Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, a Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.
Buried resentments, unexpected disappointments, new friendships, small acts of cruelty, journeys that take you back to where you started. With trademark compassion and tender irony, Anita Desai’s short stories give us familiar worlds made unfamiliar, to wonderful effect.
An ageing couple is stranded in a stultifying Delhi summer by the visit of a roguish old Oxford friend, who trades on his charm; an American woman turns to hippies living in the Indian hills, homesick for the farmlands of Vermont; a dog terrorizes the neighbourhood but is cherished by his stern master; a Delhi girl of slender means finds a new kind of freedom with her young friends, in her barsati home; a peaceful game of hide and seek turns into a nightmare; a businessman sees his own death.
In one masterly volume, for the first time ever, here are Anita Desai’s collected stories —including Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight.
He was the guru of Bhishma Pitamah…
He was the avatar of Vishnu but a disciple of Shiva…
And He shall be the martial guru of Kalki, the last Avatar in this Yuga!
When the Chandravanshi emperor Arjun began expanding his empire to the entire world, the Asuras hit back with an insidious plan. Caught in the crossfire is Raam, who comes back from his penance tofind 21 arrows piercing his father’s body. Raam vows to avenge his death by killing the evil Kshatriyas 21 times starting with Arjun.
Thus begins The Legend of Parshuram.
In 2020, eleven years after the passengers of flight BA142 from London to Delhi developed extraordinary abilities corresponding to their innermost desires, the world is overrun with supers. Some use their powers for good, others for evil, and some just want to pulverize iconic monuments and star in their own reality show. But now, from New York to Tokyo, someone is hunting down supers, killing heroes and villains both, and it’s up to the Unit to stop them. This sequel to Turbulence brings all of its suspenseful elements to bear upon the present day.
Young Aman Sen has turned into a communications demigod, able to control all networks, after a strange flight from London to Delhi. Other passengers also now possess extraordinary abilities corresponding to their innermost desires, some wonderful, some worrying – and Aman and his collective must now help save the world. Will they succeed or will it all end, as 80 years of superhero fiction suggest, in a meaningless, explosive slugfest?
All of Kali and Ponna’s efforts to conceive a child-from prayers topenance, potions to pilgrimages-have been in vain. Despite being in aloving and sexually satisfying relationship, they are relentlessly houndedby the taunts and insinuations of the people around them.Ultimately, all their hopes and apprehensions come to converge on thechariot festival in the temple of the half-female god Ardhanareeswaraand the revelry surrounding it. Everything hinges on the one night whenrules are relaxed and consensual union between any man and woman issanctioned. This night could end the couple’s suffering and humiliation.But it will also put their marriage to the ultimate test.Acutely observed, One Part Woman lays bare with unsparing clarity arelationship caught between the dictates of social convention and the tugof personal anxieties, vividly conjuring an intimate and unsettling portraitof marriage, love and sex.
Calcutta, 1841. Emanuel, an ambitious Jewish merchant, wants to make his fortune by trading opium with China. Over the ensuing decades, Emanuel’s success will be determined by two remarkable women: Semah, his dutiful first wife in Calcutta whose dowry funds the mercenary expedition to Hong Kong; and Pearl, the beautiful Chinese girl whom he falls in love with. Despite the open hostility between the two women, Emanuel insists that they must all live together in his Hong Kong mansion that locals call the House of Wives.
Brimming with intrigue and adventure, and written with astounding flair, The House of Wives is a dramatic and poignant tale of love, ambition, friendship and family inspired by the true story of the author’s great-grandfather.
In the idyllic university town, young women daydreamed as they lay on the grass and gazed up at the clouds. Young men took morning walks at Alfred Park. Hot summer afternoons were for drinking sherbet and eating watermelons, and evenings were meant for reading poetry. It was also a time of stifling social mores, and love was an unattainable ideal seldom realized. Allahabad of the 1940s is the serene backdrop to the turbulence of Chander s love for his professor s daughter Sudha. Driven by his passionate belief in the transcending purity of their love, Chander persuades Sudha to marry another man, to devastating consequences. Unhinged by his separation from Sudha and consumed by a restless desire to make sense of love Is it really about sex? Is the purity of love a lie? Chander spirals into a destructive affair with the seductive Pammi. Immensely popular since its publication more half a century ago, Chander & Sudha continues to seduce readers with its potent mix of tender passion and heartbreaking tragedy.
Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite, he is now a withered shell; a man broken by torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him. He looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Terai foothills—and he remembers too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he made, and the ideals he once believed in.
Dark, powerful and full of ambiguities, the classic Mahakaler Rather Ghoda (1977) questions the human cost of revolution and its inevitable transience. A sensation in its time, it remains one of the greatest novels about the Naxalite movement.
Inspired by the romances of Walter Scott, Durgeshnandini is a swashbuckling historical epic set in Bengal during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century.
