When Helen Fielding first wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, charting the life of
a 30-something singleton in London in the 1990s, she introduced readers to one of the most beloved characters in modern literature. The book was published in 40 countries, sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, and spawned a best-selling sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. The two books were turned into major blockbuster films starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
With her hotly anticipated third instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to a whole new enticing phase of Bridget’s life set in contemporary London, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by and the nightmare of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous email cc, total lack of twitter followers, and TVs that need 90 buttons and three remotes to simply turn on. An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favourite Everywoman.
Set in Shimla, The Red Tin Roof evokes with rare delicacy and precision the interplay of seasons, nature and people, while it broodingly tells the story of a young girl growing into adolescence, in the company mostly of older women but also of a younger brother who trails her. In this exploration
of an inner world, Nirmal Verma does not so much as tell a story as reminisce. Memory is the seed of his story.
DO MIRACLES REALLY HAPPEN?
Sixteen-year-old Trisha is hugely embarrassed by her hip mom who rides around on a monster motorbike called Smelly Beast. But along with her exuberant little sister, Shivi, they make for a quirky threesome, as Trisha adjusts to a new school, explores her talent for singing and falls head over heels for Akshay. Trisha’s happy-go-lucky world suddenly comes crashing down when a fatal illness befalls her mother. She struggles to make the transition from a carefree teenager to a responsible adult, hoping that some miracle will magically set things right. Poignant and deeply sensitive, Miracles is a heart-warming coming-of- age story of a feisty young girl’s struggle against her fate.
Dadi, the imperious matriarch of the Bandian family in Karachi, swears by the virtues of arranged marriage. All her ancestors – including a dentally and optically challenged aunt – have been perfectly well served by such arrangements. But her grandchildren are harder to please.
The Scatter Here Is Too Great heralds a major new voice from Pakistan with a stunning debut-a novel told in a rich variety of distinctive voices that converge at a single horrific event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city.
Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words
1970s Calcutta. The city is teeming with thousands of young men in search of work. Somnath Banerjee “1970s Calcutta. The city is teeming with thousands of young men in search of work. Somnath Banerjee spends his days queuing up at the employment exchange. Unable to find a job despite his qualifications, Somnath decides to go into the order-supply business as a middleman. His ambition drives him to prostitute an innocent girl for a contract that will secure the future of Somnath Enterprises. As Somnath grows from an idealistic young man into a corrupt businessman, the novel becomes a terrifying portrait of the price the city extracts from its youth. Sankar’s The Middleman is the moving story of a man torn between who he is and what he wants to be. Stark and disquieting, the novel deftly exposes the decaying values and rampant corruption of a metropolis that is built on broken dreams and morbid reality. The evocative prose and vivid imagery in this first-ever translation successfully capture the textures of the Bengali original.
How low will you stoop to fulfil your dreams?
Jeet Roy, a college Casanova, has published a book by unfair means.
All he wants is to earn loads of money and have hot girls chase after him
wherever he goes!
Rohit Sehdev, a one-book-old popular fiction writer is furious when he
finds out that his publisher has cheated him out of his royalties.
Karun Ahuja is a highly ambitious schoolboy who wants to win the heart
his lady love by writing a novel about it. And he doesn’t mind playing dirty
to get to the top.
Ruthlessly exploiting these ambitious young men is their unscrupulous
publisher.
Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, Paperback Dreams is the story of
a new breed of young writers who will do anything to get famous, fast.
Kamran Khan is a cocky young taxi driver trying to make it big in Mumbai.
But his life transforms when he saves a don called Mirza from being
killed. What seems like a good deed however has a cruel payback and
in a single moment, Kamran loses everything dear to him. This is when
Mirza, in gratitude, takes Kamran under his wing and the young man gets
drawn into the mafia boss’s dangerous world of cops and rival gangsters,
eventually taking over from him.
Kamran also inherits Mirza’s philosophy that all of life’s problems can be
solved through Ghalib¹s poetry.
Soon, the innocent taxi driver has cops, criminals and even cabinet
ministers at his beck and call.
And he has a new name—Ghalib Danger.
Ace crime journalist Joy Dutta is killed, and his arch rival, Jagruti Verma,
is accused of using her alleged connection with the dreaded don Chikna
Ramu to commit the murder. Their mentor and ex-boss, Ammar Aney,
whose exposés had earned him the respect of his fraternity, and whose
enemies had conspired to destroy his personal and professional life, is
forced out of retirement to get justice for both Joy and Jagruti. As he
delves deeper, Aney realizes that the culprits and their motives are more
dangerous than he could have ever imagined.
Struggling newspaper-editor Hissam is finding it harder and harder to pretend that believing in your work is just as satisfying as landing a big promotion. His old college friend Kaiser has fared considerably better as one of the city’s wealthiest property developers, who also happens to be married to the woman of Hissam’s dreams. Hissam’s chance to strike it big presents itself in the form of a military-backed Emergency that upends the country’s social order. Choosing to back different sides, Hissam and Kaiser find themselves trading places in a way that changes their relationship, and their lives, forever.
This richly satirical novel heralds a major new voice from Bangladesh.
