An absorbing new novel from the author of ‘That Long Silence’ and ‘Roots and Shadows’
When Gopal walks out on her for reasons even he cannot articulate, Sumi returns with their three daughters, Aru, Charu, and Seema, to the shelter of the Big House, where her parents, Kalyani and Shripati, live in a strangely oppressive silence; they have not spoken to each other in the last thirty-five years. As the mystery of this long silence is unraveled, a horrifying story of loss and agony is laid bare, a story that seems to be repeating itself in Sumi’s life…
Set in present-day Karnataka, ‘A Matter of Time’ explores the intricate relationships within an extended family, encompassing three generations of men and women. At the heart of the novel is eighteen-year-old Aru, struggling to understand her father’s ‘desertion’ and her mother’s ‘indifference’, and in the course of a few turbulent months, forging entirely unexpected relationships that are destined to change the course of her life…
Deeply unsettling, yet with moments of warmth and laughter, this is Shasi Deshpande at her poignant best.
From Kannada’s first Jnanpith award winner, a landmark of modern fiction that documents a vanishing world. When Hoovayya and Ramayya return from their studies in the city to their ancestral home, much has changed, throwing the even tenor of village life out of joint. The entry of Subbamma, the young wife of much-married Chandrayya Gowda into the House of Kanooru, sets in motion an irrevocable chain of events which signify the coming of age of a resolutely traditional society. Acutely conscious of the burden of their education amidst the torpor of manorial life, the brothers are forced to witness the descent into cruelty of Chandrayya Gowda, who breaks old familial ties, and demands an impossible fealty. The petty meanness of the Gowda s old age and the idealistic vitality of youth confront each other when Hoovayya and Ramayya both fall in love with Seethe, their childhood playmate, with disastrous consequences for the manor house of Kanooru. The epic conflicts of a decaying feudal order are seen through a multiplicity of characters, and voices that refuse to be silenced. The first stirrings of change in the lives of the Belas, the highland plantation workers and their labouring women, the proud Shudra landowners, the secretive and predatory Agrahara of the Brahmins, are dramatized by a humane eye sensitive to the slightest nuance. The House of Kanooru is ultimately a moving tribute by one of Kannada s greatest writers to the spirit of modernity. Translated from the Kannada by B.C. Ramachandra Sharma and Padma Ramachandra Sharma.
Jalauddin and his men are back in India, and within the next few weeks they will shake you and Kashmir like nothing before.’ With barely three months to go for the American President’s visit to India, Major Vijay Kaul learns of an incredible plot hatched by a rogue faction of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the world’s most lethal terrorist organizations. Afghanistan-trained militant Jalauddin has entered India with only one aim—to destroy any hope of lasting peace in Kashmir. The security forces race against time, trying frantically to foil the plot. But even as they employ their best men and resources to track down Jalauddin, there is something far more sinister brewing—a meticulously planned operation to unleash chaos and bring India to her knees. Highly charged and brilliantly plotted, The Srinagar Conspiracy is the first thriller to be set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir. Expertly blending fact with fiction, the book describes the rise of militancy in Kashmir over the past decade and a half, and tells the human story of those whose lives were shaped by events beyond their control and whose actions could now decide the fate of the subcontinent.
A hard-boiled, fast-paced narrative about sexual and political corruption in contemporary India Ajit Vajpayee is a drifter. A confused Marxist and a voyeur, his is a life of little action and desperate thoughts—about political ideology, violence and sex. One empty afternoon in Lucknow, a mysterious man who knows his darkest secrets and shares his disillusionment with women offers him an opportunity for adventure: he must spy on a minister’s wife, a woman, he is told, with a genius for deception. The unlikely mission takes Ajit to Bombay and Bihar, and he finds himself hopelessly caught up in a murky world of low politics, high crime and twisted carnality. An erotic thriller set against the backdrop of caste conflicts, mafia intrigue and the amorality of a modern world driven purely by ambition and wealth, The Minister’s Wife is a racy and rewarding read.
A haunting collection of stories from the master of suspense and intrigue, this book showcases some of Satyajit Ray’s memorable explorations into the twilight territories of the peculiar and supernatural.
Classic tales of crime detection featuring Byomkesh Bakshi, the master inquisitor. Written long before Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries heralded a new era in Bengali popular fiction . Set in the old-world Kolkata, three stories featuring the astute investigator and his chronicler friend Ajit are still as gripping and delightful as when they first appeared.
Byomkesh’s world, peopled with wonderfully delineated characters and framed by a brilliantly captured pre-Independence urban milieu, is fascinating because of its cotemporary flavour, In the first story, Byomkesh works undercover to expose an organized crime ring trafficking in drugs. In the ‘Gramophone Pin Mystery’, he must put his razor-sharp intellect to good used to unearth the pattern behind a series of bizarre roadside murders. In ‘Clalamity Strikes’, the ace detective is called upon to investigate the strange and sudden death of a girl in a neighbour’s kitchen, In the next story, he has to lock horns with an old enemy who has vowed to kill him with an innocuous but deadly weapon. And, in ‘ Picture Imperfect’, Byomkesh unravels a complex mystery involving a stolen group photograph, an amorous couple, and an apparently unnecessary murder.
A ribald, good-natured story of love in Delhi.
Jaishree Mishra’s second novel is an unexpected romp through the universal dilemmas of love and marriage. It is a compelling tale of icompatible relationships and their astonishing success rated. The Sachdevs, Memoms and Singhs are urban Indians, normal folk with everyday converns, instantly recognizable, in fact, just a little bit like youji and me. But when a foppish Delhiwalla falls for a loverly, smart keralite and his brother finds remance abroad, passion and comedy take control of their destinaies. Why are any of these couples married to each other? Why are the unmarried wanting to marry each other? And why are some of them friends? For wouldn’t you have throught that friends, at the very least, had to be vaguely compatible, even if husbands and wives weren’t?
This hilarious tale of imcompatiblities explores why we do the things we do or, indeed, why we let them happen to us.
Meet Chris Stark—six-feet-four, weighing a healthy 300 pounds—a former player of American football who, as he himself is the first to accept, ‘think pretty good but don’t talk that great on account of playing too much football’. Following the pportunities created by Liberalisation, his family’s c orporation h as e ntered in to a business
collaboration with an Indian company, and this has brought the sportive young man to Delhi. While in India he becomes enmeshed i n i ndustrial d isputes, p olitical
machinations, weird intelligence webs and an unfortunate love
affair, besides various other oddities.
The solution to the entire Gordian knot of problems lies in making
the Minister smile. What happens?
The rich and varied body of writing in the Indian languages has grown immenasurably in the last hundred yeards. This collection of short stories brings together some pernnial favourites from this vast treasure trve, written by acknowledged masters of the art and sensitively translated. The twenty-three stories included here deal with themes central to modern India:caste, gender politics and emerging changes in the traditonal family structure, These are striking vignettes from all parts of te country, evocative of different lifestyles, yet reflective of common problems and issues with which we can all idnetify.
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award An award-winning novel that uses both vast panoramic views and lovingly reconstructed detail to provide an unforgettable picture of nineteenth-century Bengal. The Bengal Renaissance and the 1857 uprising form the backdrop to Those Days, a saga of human frailties and strength. The story revolves around the immensely wealthy Singha and Mukherjee families, and the intimacy that grows between them. Ganganarayan Singha’s love for Bindubasini, the widowed daughter of the Mukherjees, flounders on the rocks of orthodoxy even as his zamindar father, Ramkamal, finds happiness in the arms of the courtesan, Kamala Sundari. Bimbabati, Ramkamal’s wife, is left to cope with her loneliness. A central theme of the novel is the manner in which the feudal aristocracy, sunk in ritual and pleasure, slowly awakens to its social obligations. Historical personae interact with fictional protagonists to enrich the narrative. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the reformer; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the poet; the father and son duo of Dwarkanath and Debendranath Tagore; Harish Mukherjee, the journalist; Keshab Chandra Sen, the Brahmo Samaj radical; David Hare and John Bethune, the English educationists—these and a host of others walk the streets of Calcutta again, to bring alive a momentous time.
