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.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
The Scatter Here Is Too Great
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
The Middleman
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.
Paperback Dreams
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.
Ghalib Danger
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.
A Convenient Culprit
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.
The World In My Hands
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.
Indian Tango
‘To say that, in fact, writing has been no more than a way of talking about the body and nothing but the body…’
Lost to the meaning of her life, a foreign writer arrives in Delhi seeking the wordless company of strangers. Delhi is an exploded sun, bleeding everywhere its untrammelled chaos: the feral dampness of bus fumes; the suicidal rush of scooters; the autorickshaw seats impregnated with thousands of odours—nauseous accretions of India’s muddy human tide. The men with their stinking bidis rule as masters and the women remain walled in by centuries of tradition. The author, infatuated by a quiet lady on the street, begins to seek the untamed and undiscovered country that lies below her sari, the delicate throbbing hidden beneath her silence. As she rediscovers her voice and the ability to write a story, and as monsoon arrives, low and heavy-bellied, washing away the concrete barricades of custom, a secret encounter in a music store opens up an ancient darwaza of forbidden pleasures.
Bursting with sharp irreverence, Indian Tango is a story of fleshly transgression and unlikely liberation in the patriachopolis of New Delhi.
Mirror City
It is 1973. A newly independent Bangladesh is collapsing under the weight of impending famine, unemployment and political corruption. In the midst of this upheaval, Uma, a Bengali from Calcutta, moves to Dhaka with her husband Iqbal. As the young woman learns to make the new city her home, she faces upheavals of her own. Iqbal is a changed man; their mixed marriage raises too many eyebrows; and the charged atmosphere in Dhaka makes it impossible to trust anyone. Uma has never felt so utterly alone in her life, until she finds herself unexpectedly falling in love.
Mirror City brilliantly captures the turbulent early days of Bangladesh, the slow breakdown of a marriage, and a woman’s search to find herself. Nuanced, atmospheric and full of drama, this is an utterly compelling novel.
Kindled Lives
Will destiny bring them together? Maybe, with a little help…
Returning home after a decade in the United States, blue-blooded billionaire Aditya Maurya is baffled by his father’s wish that he marry Rhea. To him she is nothing more than an orphan of dubious parentage living off their generosity.
Rhea, self-confident and spirited, brought up under the care of the Maurya family, is still smarting from the handsome Jr Maurya’s humiliation of her five years ago.
The ailing patriarch of the family Vijayendra Maurya, however, feels that they are perfect for each other. Also, he has a promise to keep…
Forced into marriage by Sr Maurya’s ill-health, Aditya and Rhea call a truce. Soon, they discover each other’s true selves and passion ignites between them.
Will their love withstand the truth about Rhea’s birth, though?