Winner of the Philips Literary Award in Bangladesh
The Woman Who Flew (Urukkoo) tells the story of Nina, a young woman who moves from small-town Bangladesh to the megacity of Dhaka, where she soon finds herself divorced, bereaved of her newborn and trapped in a mundane existence. Hungry for fresh air, Nina strikes up a friendship with her mother’s handsome ex-lover, Irfan, who encourages her to paint again. But as Nina tugs at her chains, her sexually confused ex-husband, Rezaul, insinuates himself back into her life, leaving her pregnant . . .
Intense, edgy and tinged with rage, The Woman Who Flew lays bare the inner world of a woman beating her wings against a hostile, conservative landscape.
A well-known figure in Pune, Achyut Athavale is a retired economist of wide-ranging interests and some social standing. He is often invited to give lectures and speak at public events. One such speech results in a riot taking place in the city, leading a troubled Achyut to move into a home for the elderly located near three small villages in rural India named Norway, Sweden and Denmark. There Achyut suffers a temporary loss of memory and murders another inmate of the home. Events take a turn for the bizarre with the media, the Hindi film industry and some international political figures campaigning to assert Achyut’s innocence.
Bringing together the stylistic elements of the early twentieth-century Marathi novel and the modern European Absurd in this superbly crafted exploration of causality and memory, Makarand Sathe creates a scathing and humorous narrative around the happenings of Achyut’s life.
Jhoomur Bose is a former journalist, blogger and full-time mother. She has written for various Indian magazines, newspapers and websites and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. She writes about stuff that happens and stuff she wishes would happen at http://twistingthetail.blogspot.com
In an age when rabbits live in happy freedom from their natural predators and are busy violently taming Nature, some of them seek to do away with warren dwelling, and liberate themselves from the old ways. They find a true believer in Rabbit Hab, an enterprising head rabbit. As the ambitious Hab presses forward with his futuristic vision, he must contend with opposition, sabotage, and dirty double-dealing from some unlikely quarters.
Murder is committed for its own sake in the three fictional episodes of The Book of Destruction. In ‘The Gardener’, the narrator learns from the thug Seshadri that he has been selected for assassination for no reason but the pure purpose of killing. A discotheque is bombed out of existence in ‘The Hotelier and the Traveller’. In the third episode, leading the narrator to an elaborately staged orgy and sacrifice, stitched clothes escape from a tailor’s shop and soar down the streets to take over bodies.
The cruelty of killers and the wretchedness of victims are shifted to the margins as the novel focuses on the act of murder. In his inimitable style, Anand takes the mesmerized reader on a journey of three stages-the practice of killing, the sacrifice of the victim and the sacrifice of the sacrificer-before bringing the story of destruction to its finale.
Love is never easy, and it’s playing a cruel prank on Karan
Nothing hassles Karan, the smooth-talking bad boy who enjoys a successful job as a copywriter in the work-hard-party-harder world of advertising. He can always depend on his bindaas attitude and incessant supply of wisecracks to get out of any tricky situation. Everything is perfect . . . until Sonia tumbles into his life. After an initial battle of egos, Karan falls hard and fast for Sonia, but he can never find the right moment to confess his feelings to her. Then he meets Anita. And that’s when things get really complicated.
Screwed follows Karan’s misadventures with hilarious zeal as he comes to realize that ignoring a problem is NOT the best way to deal with it, and making the right choice NEVER is ever easy.
Karsan Dargawalla has always known that he will succeed his father as guardian of a Sufi shrine and an earthly avatar of the thirteenth-century mystic, Pir Bawa—but all he desires is to be “ordinary,” and play first-class cricket. When he goes away to study in the United States, he discovers an exhilarating freedom and rejects his inheritance; his life experiences however ultimately draw him back to his spiritual heritage. He returns to India to find a communally torn Gujarat, a despoiled shrine, and a fugitive brother.
With its grand historical sweep and intense personal drama, this superbly crafted novel tells a powerful story of one man’s struggle to balance life and faith.
Each summer three siblings visit their bitter grandmother in her dreary seaside home. Faruk, the eldest, is alcoholic, divorced and a drift. Metin, the youngest, dreams of escaping to America. In between is their sister, Nilgun, a fiery revolutionary, hurtling towards womanhood. Over the week, the family face first love, old ghosts and childhood memories. Watching them is the dwarf house keeper Recep, who has stories of his own.
Fateh Singh Rathore devoted the better part of his life to making Ranthambhore National Park a safe haven for the tiger population to live and grow in. He was intolerant of red tape and led a tireless crusade against poachers. Globally respected for his work, he was unpopular with Indian forest officials whenever he sought to point out anything that went wrong or the falling tiger numbers. In such cases, the official reaction was always denial—in other national parks such as Sariska or Panna, this kind of denial has led to a near wipeout of the entire tiger population.
Fateh survived a bid on his life, fought stiff resistance from a powerful lobby of bureaucrats, and was even barred entry into his beloved national park, all because he would not give up his fight to save the tigers. Yet, against all odds, he remained an eminently upright man, admired by Rajiv Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Amitabh Bachchan, and wildlife activists like Valmik Thapar. Deeply loyal to his friends, Fateh remained an unconventional family man, a gifted amateur actor and a lover of the good life. Soonoo Taraporewala’s insightful biography, based on her years of association with this indomitable ‘tiger warrior’, not only brings alive Fateh Singh Rathore’s extraordinary legacy but also opens up wider questions about wildlife conservation in India.
Simon Jesukumar, an ageing widower in Chennai, passionately aspires to do something worthwhile with what remains of his life. Dominated by his wife during their otherwise happy married life, he struggles to break free from the haunting memories of the iron hand with which she led him. His aspirations are stirred by his nagging guilt about the slum, optimistically called Sitara, next door. As the story plunges into the heart of the slum, it brings together the most unlikely characters. Simon begins to understand why good intentions and small acts of mercy are no answer to the problems of a section of humanity he never knew.
Simon’s dilemma is ours: How can, or how should, the well-off help the poor?
Coming from one of the finest chroniclers of modern Indian life, The Story That Must Not be Told holds up a mirror to a moving, unseen, and deeply unsettling reality.
