Catagory: Fiction

Dashing DSP Bikram Chatterjee of the West Bengal Police hates his boss, the boorish SP Toofan Kumar. And he knows his boss especially resents his affair with screen goddess Shona Chowdhury-it’s a rank thing. Bikram is keenly aware of the two distinct worlds he inhabits: the posh circles of Toofan and Shona-a world he instinctively distrusts-and the grimy world of crime with which he is familiar, even comfortable. Then Robi Bose, former darling of Calcutta’s Page 3, is found dead with bloody froth on his lips and Bikram is given the task of investigating this high-profile death in double-quick time. This, in addition to all his other duties-cultivating informers, breaking up drug-smuggling rackets on the Indo-Bangladesh border and providing security for occasionally violent football matches. And as the investigation draws him in, Bikram finds his two worlds colliding in unexpected ways. Gripping, gritty and one hundred per cent honest, F.I.R. inaugurates the DSP Bikram series-the first desi police procedural.

Every woman has a story to tell.
Random House India, in collaboration with MSN, presents an extraordinary collection of stories from twelve talented women writers across the country—a woman trapped in a stifling marriage makes a shocking discovery, a repressed memory is suddenly brought back by a dead tree, a self-styled nun finds unlikely love in a Tibetan monastery. Rich and deeply evocative, She Writes is a celebration of some of the most exciting writing talent in our country.
Winner names: • Anisha Bhaduri • Geeta Sundar • Sheela Jaywant • Prarthana Rao • Aprameya Manthena • Chitralekha • Belinder Dhanoa • Yishey Doma • Santana Pathak • Amrita Saikia • Jyotsna Jha • Shreya Manjunath

Set during a monsoon season in the 1980s in a small town in Pakistan, Season of the Rainbirds is centred on the mysterious reappearance of a sack of letters lost in a train crash nineteen years previously. Could the letters have any bearing on Judge Anwar’s murder? The letters and the judge’s death trigger a series of tragic events and as the murder investigation progresses, dark tales of passion and betrayal unfold and long-buried secrets come to light.

The narrative segues between several characters—the judge’s family, a cleric troubled by local inhabitants’ lapses, a Muslim deputy commissioner defiantly involved with a Christian woman, a feudal landlord and a crusading journalist reporting on the delivery of the mail packet—and comes to a head when the journalist disappears and the country lurches between fear and uncertainty following an assassination attempt on the president.

One of the most exquisite fictional debuts, Season of the Rainbirds is a compelling portrayal of a society in strife, of a timeless world where daily rituals are played out against an ominous landscape of oppression, decadence, bigotry and power.

Set in a nameless British town that its Pakistani-born immigrants have renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the Desert of Solitude, Maps for Lost Lovers is an exploration of cultural tension and religious bigotry played out in the personal breakdown of a single family. As the book begins, Jugnu and Chanda, whose love is both passionate and illicit, have disappeared from their home. Rumours about their disappearance abound, but five months pass before anything certain is known. Finally, on a snow-covered January morning, Chanda’s brothers are arrested for the murder of their sister and Jugnu.

Maps for Lost Lovers traces the year following Jugnu and Chanda’s disappearance. Seen principally through the eyes of Jugnu’s brother Shamas, the cultured, poetic director of the local Community Relations Council and Commission for Racial Equality, and his wife Kaukab, mother of three increasingly estranged children and devout daughter of a Muslim cleric, the event marks the beginning of the unravelling of all that is sacred to them. It fills Shamas’s own house and life with grief and, in exploring the lovers’ disappearance and its aftermath, Nadeem Aslam discloses a legacy of miscomprehension and regret not only for Shamas and Kaukab but for their children and neighbours as well.

An intimate portrait of a community searingly damaged by traditions, this is a densely imagined, beautiful and deeply troubling book written in heightened prose saturated with imagery. It casts a deep gaze on themes as timeless as love, nationalism and religion, while meditating on how these forces drive us apart.

Anna Sanderson is not your average thirty-something. She’s a war journalist based in one of the most troubled countries in the world—Afghanistan. Sexy, tough as nails, and ballsy as hell, she won’t stop at anything to get her scoop or the man she wants. But the game changes when she meets Mr Delectable—handsome, aloof, and secretive, he frustratingly keeps Anna guessing if he’s into her or not.
Things take a nasty turn when Anna’s best friend Kelly discovers that her boyfriend, Rich, has been cheating on her and Anna unearths a series of secrets which tie in her man. The mission—Operation Lipstick—takes Anna on a journey into the heart of the Helmand Province and the lair of the most feared movements of the world—the Taliban. Will Kelly get her revenge? Will Anna survive to tell her story? Will she get her man?

The Immortals tells the story of two families bound by music. Shyamji is the son of the acclaimed classical singer Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father – and knows he never will be. His student, Mallika Sengupta, is a talented singer who has never pushed herself while her son Nirmalya, also Shyamji’s student, believes in suffering for his art and judges Shyam Lal for selling out. Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals is an acutely observed and lyrical novel about the place of art in the modern world.

In the first of a charming series, we meet Jana Bibi, who has inherited her grandfather’s house in a quaint hill station in India.

Casting aside the conventions of her upper-crust upbringing, Janet (Jana) Laird moves with her chatty parrot, Mr. Ganguly, and her loyal housekeeper, Mary, to Hamara Nagar, a town where the local merchants are philosophers, the chief of police is a bully, and a bagpipe-playing Gurkha keeps wild monkeys at bay. Settling in, Jana meets the town’s colorful local characters who gather at the Why Not? tea shop—the contemplative darzi who struggles with his business and family; a kindly shopkeeper whose shop is bursting at the seams with objects of unknown provenance; a newspaper editor who burns the midnight oil at his printing press; a tyrannical head of police who rules with an iron hand; and a young man with a golden voice, who wants to be a singer in the movies.

When word gets out that a new government dam will flood the little hill station, forcing everyone to move and start over, Jana is enlisted to save the community. Will Hamara Nagar survive? With some luck and Mr. Ganguly the fortune-telling parrot, the townspeople may have fate on their side.

Hugo Baumgartner is a firangi wherever he goes—too dark for Hitler’s Germany, too fair for India. Escaping the Nazi regime but losing his parents to it, the wandering Jew builds a life in India only to be interrupted by war, and then partition—and finally finds a home in multitudinous Bombay.

We meet him as a kindly, rather hapless old man who spends his days making the rounds of local teashops to scavenge for his many cats. Then, one day at the Café du Paris, one of his regular haunts, he encounters a surly young German of the new order—a drug-crazed hippie who will change his life forever.

Set in Berlin, Venice, Calcutta—and of course Bombay—Baumgartner’s Bombay is the story of the twentieth century and a memorable portrait of Baumgartner, survivor, victim, everyman.