Inspired by the romances of Walter Scott, Durgeshnandini is a swashbuckling historical epic set in Bengal during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
A Strange And Sublime Address
Ten-year-old Sandeep, an only child in a Bombay high-rise, visits his extended family in Calcutta during the school holidays-leaving the smooth silence of his parents’ modern flat for a world of enchantment in his uncle’s home. Everything is different here. In a short novel filled with indelible characters, we witness the beautiful ordinariness of daily life in a middle-class family dependent on a failing business. Whether they are push-starting a stubborn Ambassador, combating heatwaves and thunderstorms or saying their prayers, the young narrator’s keen eye misses nothing.
Widely hailed as a poet of the mundane, the renowned Amit Chaudhuri gives us contemporary India as you never see it. In this 25th anniversary edition of his exquisite debut, comprising a novel and nine stories, revisit this acute portrait of Calcutta from one of our finest novelists: a small masterpiece.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
A lush, richly layered novel and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling
In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangeness begins. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. It is the onset of an epic war between light and dark, spanning a thousand and one nights, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.
Inspired by the traditional ‘wonder tales’ of the East, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.
When Darkness Falls And Other Stories
In When Darkness Falls and Other Stories, Ruskin Bond displays all the qualities of a master storyteller: a deceptively effortless style, an eye for the extraordinary in seemingly humdrum lives, and a deep empathy with his characters. We make the acquaintance of Markham, a war veteran condemned to a lifetime of loneliness by a tragic accident; Susanna, the merry widow who loved each of her seven husbands to death; the sad wife who returns after her death only to find that her husband has moved on to another life and another wife; a simpleton who outwits a crafty ghost; and Kundan Lal, the reckless rake whom women find irresistible. We also go down memory lane with the author, Dehradun of the 1940s and ’50s, where there was space for the small errors of young and eccentric lives.
Humorous, sad and nostalgic, the stories in the collection are a treat for all Ruskin Bond fans.
Face In Dark And Other Haunting
Ruskin bond once famously remarked that while he does not believe in ghosts, he sees them all the time – in the woods, in a bar, in a crowd outside a cinema. Not surprising, then, that in his stories ghosts, jinns, witches – and the occasional monster – ae as real as the people he writes about. He makes the supernatural appear entirely natural, and therefore harder to ignore. This collection brings together all of Ruskin Bond’s tales of the paranormal written over five decades. It opens with perhaps his best-known story, the unforgettable, Á face in the dark’, set in a pine forest outside Simla, and ends with the shockingly macabre ‘Night of the Millennium’, where the scene of the action is an abondoned cemetery. In between are tales featuring monkeys and a pack of dogs come back from the dead, an elderly lady who is a witch after dark, a schoolboy riding his bicycle up and down the country road where he was killed, and Kipling’s ghost in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. comprising twenty-eight classic stories that range from the chilling to the whimsical for the supernatural has its funny side too, a face in the dark and other hauntings is the perfect collection to have by your bedside when the moon is up.
The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons
‘I was born ugly. That’s what my mother always said.’
So begins the story of young Sonny Mahadewala who leads a dual life: between his adoptive England where he cohabits with a privileged American; and the mixed blessings of Mahadewala Walauwa – the big house on the mountain belonging to his father’s people in Kandy, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka-where a troubled existence has earned him both honour and shame. For Sonny’s mother, a wonderfully maleficent anti-heroine, is convinced that demons possess this ugly son of hers. Demons and the devil himself circumscribe the playing field of this book, whether seated in the draughty chapels of Oxford or roaming the Kandyan countryside, and through their clever interplay they speak of larger horrors with able grace.
For who in this world is utterly good or utterly evil-and who, indeed, is the devil?
We Weren’t Lovers Like That
At the start of the new millennium, Aftab’s life came undone. He turned forty, and his wife of fourteen years left him for another man, taking their only child with her. Now he is on a train to Dehradun, the town of his childhood, doing the one thing he feels he is still good at: running away. As he looks back on his imperfect past, crowded with personal and professional compromises, only a slim hope saves him from despair: perhaps this flight will give him a second chance to reclaim a long-lost love that could have been his, had he the courage of his convictions. And then he can start afresh. With uncommon sensitivity and a rare understanding of human emotions, Navtej Sarna has produced a poignant account of a life of missed opportunities and approximate loves.
The Shadow Lines
As a young boy, Amitav Ghosh’s narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him, traversing the unreliable planes of memory, unmindful of physical, political and chronological borders. But as he grows older, he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that we draw dividing people and nations. Out of a complex web of memories, relationships and images, Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. Exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people, Ghosh depicts the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Pyre
‘Pyre glows with as much power as [One Part Woman] did, and adds immeasurable value to contemporary Indian literature’-The Hindu
Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. After a hasty wedding, they arrive in Kumaresan’s village, harboring a dangerous secret: their marriage is an inter-caste one, likely to upset the village elders should they get to know of it. Kumaresan is naively confident that all will be well. But nothing is further from the truth. Despite the strident denials of the young couple, the villagers strongly suspect that Saroja must belong to a different caste. It is only a matter of time before their suspicions harden into certainty and, outraged, they set about exacting their revenge.
A devastating tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling savagery, Pyre conjures a terrifying vision of intolerance.
Current Show
Sathi is a young soda-seller in a run-down cinema hall in a small town. Ill-paid and always weary, he finds relief from everyday tedium in marijuana and his friends-vulnerable, desperate young men who work around the movie hall. An intense and tender friendship with one of the men sustains Sathi, until a train of events casts the meagre certainties of his days and nights into disarray.
Slick, visceral and startlingly inventive, Current Show unfolds in a manner that simulates rapid cinematic cuts. Murugan’s keen eye and crackling prose plumb the dark underbelly of small-town life, bringing Sathi’s world and entanglements thrillingly to life.
‘[Murugan’s] characters, dialogues and locales are unerringly drawn and intensely evocative . . . A superb writer’-Indian Express
‘The most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers’-Caravan