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.
‘मैला आंचल’ का नायक एक युवा डॉक्टर है जो अपनी शिक्षा पूरी करने के बाद पिछड़े गाँव को अपने कार्य-क्षेत्र के रूप में चुनता है, तथा इसी क्रम में ग्रामीण जीवन के पिछड़ेपन, दुःख-दैन्य, अभाव, अज्ञान, अन्धविश्वास के साथ-साथ तरह-तरह के सामाजिक शोषण-चक्रों में फँसी हुई जनता की पीड़ाओं और संघर्षों से भी उसका साक्षात्कार होता है। कथा का अन्त इस आशामय संकेत के साथ होता है कि युगों से सोई हुई ग्राम-चेतना तेजी से जाग रही है।
Published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | Longlisted for Booker Prize 2022
Who is Malinda Albert Kabalana? How did he die?
Renegade war photographer Maali Almeida has to solve his own murder. Does that sound fun? It would be if there wasn’t so much bloody red-tape to get through. Oh and it’s not as though anyone alive actually seems to miss him, and it certainly doesn’t help that his girlfriend is related to his boyfriend. Worst of all, it’s all those goddamn memories of war, constantly interrupted by the overly chatty dead folks breezing through the afterlife. Besides, he’s so busy solving his ethical dilemmas that there’s barely any time to solve a murder-even if it’s his own.
A compulsively readable dark comedy of life-death and everything in between-Chats with the Dead searingly exposes the plight of a country caught in the aftermath of civil war. Its deliciously compelling absurdity holds you in thrall right from the very first page up to its startling denouement, constantly upending its own premise with its staggering humanity.
Shehan Karunatilaka has delivered a classic whodunit with a brilliant twist.
Kunwar Narain’s unusual short stories broke new ground and rejuvenated the genre when they appeared on the Indian literary landscape in 1971. Half a century later, in vivid English translation for the first time, they seem just as far-reaching: sometimes in the novelty of their insight, sometimes in their transcendence, sometimes in the world views they together uncover.
By turns allegorical, satirical, poetic, poignant, playful and bizarre, Narain’s layered, often deceptively simple tales unravel the existential and moral bewilderments of a society navigating the cold, cruel worlds of its own creation, while also allowing hope in the truly human. These bold, sometimes comic, often experimental and metaphysical stories weave love and otherness, fantasy and history, tenderness and silence, leaving us both restive and redeemed at once.
Sanam is a carefree, but headstrong young girl. A spat with a politician’s son pushes her take up a big challenge-to become an IAS. At the same time, a small-town boy, Aamir, is nudged into studying for the civil services too. Their hard work pays off when both become rank holders.
And soon their lives come together at the IAS Training Academy, Mussoorie. Love blossoms, but when they decide to spend their lives together, all hell breaks loose. Their religious difference become a reason for clashes between the two communities, social media explodes and things take a dangerous turn.
It seems hate has triumphed over love. What will be Sanam and Aamir’s fate?
A heady mix of dreams and desire, this is a story of undying love in the face of our society’s most dangerous beliefs.
Sarojini-Saz-Campbell comes to India to search for her biological mother. Adopted and taken to England at an early age, she has a degree from Cambridge and a mathematician’s brain adept in solving puzzles. Handicapped by a missing shoebox that held her birth papers and the death of her English mother, she has few leads to carry out her mission and scant knowledge of Calcutta, her birthplace. Luckily, she has Chiru Sen, an Elvis lookalike, as her guide. Together, Saz and Chiru chase the mirage of a lost mother, helped by Chiru’s band members and his friend Suleiman, master bookie of the racecourse. When luck leads them to a slum, Jamuna, a housemaid with a troubled past, presents herself as the likely candidate. As Saz settles into the routine of slum life, a second candidate, Urvasi, presents herself, emerging from the very opposite end of the spectrum.
With Saz split in half, nothing is spared in the battle between the mothers, moving at a fast clip to the final throw of the dice as rivals await the result of DNA matching from their blood samples. But will the verdict of science settle the puzzle of motherhood for Sarojini? Or will it be left to the judgment of Suleiman the Wise, King of the Racecourse, the bearer of ancient wisdom, to arrive at that supreme revelation?
As the Mahabharata war wages on, it shows no mercy and takes no prisoners. Death and destruction abound.
In the midst of a world rendered unrecognizable by the lust for power, malice and the machinations of war stand Bhishma, contemplating the immeasurable death he sees around himself as a man who cannot die, Draupadi, above and beyond the chaos and yet at the very centre of it, trying to protect her husbands at any cost, wondering whom to trust, and Arjuna, beloved, conflicted and melancholic in equal measure, uncertain of the ultimate cost of the war
he is intent on winning. The Dharma Forest is a magnificent first novel in a trilogy filled with complex characters, conflicted loyalties and erotic jealousies from India’s most beloved epic.
Seventeen-year-old Gehna Rai has normal friends, goes to a normal school and belongs to a normally dysfunctional family. In fact, everything about Gehna is normal-except she just found out that she’s going to be a mom.
Eram, a nerdy high-school dropout, dreams of becoming a poker pro while trying to keep his dad, who has Parkinson’s disease, from going completely mental. He has little time for much else-until a chance meeting with a girl blows his life to pieces.
Sometimes together and sometimes on their own, caught between friendship and something more, Gehna and Eram travel a most unexpected road. Quirky and heartfelt, Not All Those Who Wander is a story of millennial friendship that is #litAF.
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.
He was a police officer!
The head of a police station, he was after the life of his sub-inspector because of a personal conflict between them. Hot-headed and quarrelsome, he called himself a black serpent (kaala naag), who had the most lethal bite, killing a man in just one strike. And then he struck.
The kind of thriller that will send a shudder down your spine and make your skin crawl as if a snake was uncoiling before your eyes. Unputdownable.
