‘Someone at this table has killed before, and someone at this table will kill again.’
Nikhil Kapoor, Bollywood’s biggest film director, made this shocking proclamation to his friends one night. Sameer Ali Khan, Bollywood’s badshah, seethed with rage. Nyra Oberoi, filmdom’s queen- in – waiting , turned her face away . Ishan Malhotra, producer extraordinaire, laughed out loud, while Kiki Fernandez , dress designer to the stars looked afraid. Two nights later , both Nikhil and his wife, leading actress Malika Kapoor, were found dead. It is upto senior Inspector Hoshiyar Khan to solve the puzzle.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Falling Walls
‘One of the titans of twentieth-century Hindi literature’—Caravan
A young man from Jalandhar longs to become a writer but fails at every turn. Upendranath Ashk’s 1947 novel explores in great detail the trials and tribulations of Chetan. From the back galis of Lahore and Jalandhar to Shimla’s Scandal Point, Falling Walls offers a rich and intimate portrait of lower-middle-class life in the 1930s and the hurdles an aspiring writer must overcome to fulfil his ambitions.
Crossed
War is here.
Full-scale war has erupted between the Crusaders and the demons and even Chi has to admit that it isn’t going well. Like any sensible rat, Meda’s eager to abandon the sinking ship but, unfortunately, her friends aren’t nearly as pragmatic. Instead, Meda’s forced to try to keep them all alive until the dust settles.
As the Crusaders take more and more drastic measures, the tables turn and Meda suddenly finds herself in the role of Voice of Sanity. No one is more horrified than she is. When old enemies reappear as new allies and old friends become new enemies Meda has to decide-again-whose side she’s really on.
Love Not For Sale
Love can happen anywhere, with anyone…
Kabir Thapar is the spoilt son of a rich capitalist in Mumbai. His mother’s sudden death scars him for life, leaving him at loggerheads with his father who finds himself a new wife in no time.
As Kabir embarks on a downward spiral of alcohol and drugs, he, on one ill-fated day, finds himself embroiled in a hit-and-run case. Making a quick escape, Kabir ends up in a red-light area, where he meets Sehar, a sex worker. As he falls head over heels for her, he must own up to the one emotion he has been running away from all his life—love.
From the bestselling author of A Half-baked Love Story comes a story that perfectly weaves together the explosive passion between Kabir and Sehar, the contradictions of ‘modern’ India, and the inevitable tragedy that befalls its lovers.
All Aboard!
When Rhea Khanna is dumped by her boyfriend of four years just days before her marriage , the only thing she wants to do is to get out of the city to clear her head. The opportunity presents itself immediately when her aunt, a retired school headmistress, invites her aboard a Mediterranean cruise.
As Rhea struggles to cope with her grief of being dumped at the altar, she finds herself getting attracted to the seemingly involved Kamal Shahani-the infuriatingly attractive ex-student of her aunt and a hot shot entrepreneur. To add to the confusion, Sonia, Kamal’s very attractive ex-girlfriend boards the ship in a bid to win him back.
Will Rhea heal her broken heart, or will she end up even more shattered than she was when she got on this cruise?
Time Racers
Thirteen-year-old pratik pallavanathan, aka pp’s easy life in dubai takes a horrendous turn, when, during a holiday in India, his redoubtable grandmother insists on a trip to their long-forgotten ancestral village. Cooped up in a rambling house, with on-off electricity, no internet, and annoying relatives, PP feels like he’s losing his mind. And then the hallucinations begin.
In a series of bizarre events, he sees a phantom in his room, the family’s pet cow acts weird in his presence – and a dilapidated corridor leads him to a strange land, straight to his hallucinations. A flabbergasted PP realizes he has time-travelled to 1920, and the hallucinatory phantom is his own ancestor of the time, Simha. PP realizes that he has a connection with simha.
Can PP ward off the catastrophe that’s approaching simha? and can he help realize Simha’s dream?
A Life Apart
Ritwik, twenty-two and orphaned, escapes from Calcutta to England, to start his life all over again. But his all-consuming relationship with his mother is a minefield he must first navigate. Will Ritwik find salvation through the story of an Englishwoman in Raj-era Bengal or through the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange for the care that she needs? As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.
Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling.
Odysseus Abroad
Ananda’s uncle, Rangamama, is an eccentric bachelor who has taken early retirement
and lives off his pension in a squalid bedsit in Belsize Park. His habits are angular—he
rarely bathes, and devours paranormal stories—and his personality, combative. Ananda,
by contrast, is fragile, nervous and romantic. Uncle and nephew circle around their past,
walk the streets of London and find in each other an unspoken solace.
A retelling of the story of Odysseus and Telemachus, Odysseus Abroad is a novel about
a young man and an old man, about friendship, loneliness and love. Written in a voice
at once tender and ribald, wry and unsentimental, this is Amit Chaudhuri’s most
extraordinary novel yet.
The White Castle
In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople, into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja-‘master’-a man who is his exact double. Hoja wonders, given the knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, if they could actually exchange identities.
Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colourful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.
A Strangeness in My Mind
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—”the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional, mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, hoping to become rich like the other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.
Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, a Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.