‘What could be worse than a daughter’s death?’
Ask the Nalwas, whose nuclear family implodes one night as their daughter, Ambika, is murdered and they become India’s number-one news story.
Along comes the fiery and feisty investigative reporter Meera, who finds herself unable to stop following the story, whatever the consequences. She wants justice for Ambika because this murder shakes her certainties and makes her question the sanity of her middle-class life.
As she dives into Delhi’s dirty, scandalous society of the powerful and famous, she’s confronted with rich, connected lawyers and manipulative politicians, and is given a crash course on how the levers of power are misused.
What she unmasks is a shocking conclusion to the country’s most heinous murder.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Tamas
‘Tamas, in either Rockwell’s translation or the original Hindi, remains an essential text for the times’
Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard
‘Tamas is a prophetic warning against the use of religion as a weapon to gain and perpetuate political power’ GOVIND NIHALANI
In a city in undivided Punjab, Nathu, a tanner, is bribed to kill a pig. When the animal’s carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning, simmering tensions explode into an orgy of bloodlust. But in the midst of the ensuing carnage, despite the darkness of the times, rare moments of unexpected friendship and love also surface.
Winner of the Sahitya Aakdemi Award, Sahni’s iconic novel about the Partition of India tells the tale of an unfolding riot from different vantage points. In Daisy Rockwell’s definitive translation, this magnificent work comes vividly to life.
‘Tamas drove the point home that ordinary people want to live in peace’ Guardian
Malgudi ke Afsaane
This book is based in a fictional town of Malgudi in South India. In this anthology, R.K. Narayan has painted a unique portrait of human relationships and the struggles of everyday life in, which talk about the clashes between modern urban life and old traditions. His graceful style of writing in this collection combines subtle humor with elegance and simplicity.
Hangwoman
The Grddha Mullick family takes pride in the ancient lineage they trace from four hundred years before Christ. They burst with marvelous tales of hangmen and hangings in which the Grddha Mullicks figure as eyewitnesses to the momentous events that have shaped the history of the subcontinent.
In the present day, the youngest member of the family, twenty-two-year-old Chetna, is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father Phanibhushan. Thrust suddenly into the public eye, even starring in her own reality show, Chetna’s life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. As the day of her first execution approaches, she breaks out of the shadow of a domineering father and the thrall of a brutally manipulative lover, and transforms into a charismatic performer in her own right.
Meera’s spectacular imagination turns the story of Chetna’s life into an epic and perverse coming-of-age tale. Will the ardent young woman be able to escape the love that binds her? Will she bring herself to take a life? Will she add lustre to the illustrious name of Grddha Mullick? Or will she succumb to the dazzle of celebrity and the thrill of power over life and death? The lurid pleasures of voyeurism and the punishing ironies of violence are kept in agile balance as the drama hurtles to its inevitable climax.
The Cowherd Prince
Govinda Shauri always has a plan.
Govinda, son of Nanda-one of the many cowherds in the verdant kingdom of Surasena, in Aryavarta-was content with his tough but wonderful life. That was until the king’s men came looking for him and his brother, Balabadra, spewing death and destruction in their wake.
Forced to leave behind those they love in order to save them, the brothers are now on the run-all the while being hunted by the tyrant king, Kans, and his bloodthirsty adviser, Chanuran, who will stop at nothing to kill them.
Even as their journey reveals Govinda’s true identity as a prince and the rightful heir to the Surasena crown, it pulls them deeper into the murky secrets surrounding the throne-and its bloody legacy.
What will it take for an ordinary cowherd boy to grow into a master strategist who will always have a plan?
Gods, Graves And Grandmother
For Pepper and Christ
For a century the Portuguese had been scouring the seas, collecting maps and sending spies along the Red Sea to find out how the Arabs carried on their spice trade with India … the pursuit of a legend can be pretty thankless, but it catches human imagination by the forelock.’
In his first novel noted poet and short story writer Keki N. Daruwalla brings alive a world of tumultuous voyaging during the time of Vas co da Gama-an era when the quest for exotic spices triggered a passionate desire for exploration. Legends of a magnificent Christian dominion, nestled in the heart of the East and ruled by the fabled Prester John, also generated an intense curiosity about the lands bordering the Indian Ocean.
Traversing the ocean from the Mrican coastline to Calicut on the Malabar Coast, and zigzagging through the streets of Cairo, For Pepper and Christ takes the reader on a voyage of discovery with a singular cast of characters-Brother Figuero, the fervent missionary, constantly in a tussle between felt reality and envisioned ideal; Taufiq the eternal voyager, quick to board ship and even quicker to fall in love in a strange land; Ehtesham the artist who cannot stop painting even when his life is in danger; and the Muhtasib, the Zamorin and the Abbott, three men of power, but with vastly different ways of using that power. The flight of silver doves over a church spire causes riots in Egypt; the discord between Islam and Christendom intensifies; and the individual destinies of the characters collide and coalesce in this atlas of shifting geography and looming history to form an intriguing web of power and ambition, humility and sacrifice, greed and betrayal, love and redemption. Blending historical fact with richly imagined fiction, For Pepper and Christ is imbued with the creative brilliance of one ofIndia’s finest poets.
The Inheritors
Now a strike, led by ageing Marxist trade union leader Hirenmoy Chakroborty, is destabilizing its Calcutta headquarters-and Aruna the bitter, power-hungry sister of Hari Lohia, the head of the dynasty, is using the opportunity to launch a covert takeover of the business with the help of her two ambitious sons. But Hari Lohia, who single-handedly built up Lohia & Co from a tiny jute trader in the crowded alleys of Barabazar to a sprawling global conglomerate, is not willing to let go of his empire so easily. He comes from a family of survivors, ancestors who moved across the country from Rajasthan with nothing and built their fortunes from scratch. And he discovers unlikely allies in this last great battle he has to fight-Anjali, his tough, cynical sister, a fiery opponent of Aruna’s; and Shivani, his beautiful, rebellious daughter who has always been too busy having love affairs to pay attention to her father’s business. Who will lose? Who will win? And most importantly-will the house of Lohia fall like a pack of cards? Moving from the crumbling offices of Calcutta to hedge funds in Hong Kong, from the Mumbai stock market to nineteenth century Rajasthan, and boasting an enormous cast of characters, The Inheritors is quite simply sensational.
Cold Feet
Amisha has found her perfect man and is going to marry him, but suddenly feels the need to push the boundaries of their relationship. Akshara is in love with her best friend, but while he will give her benefits, he won’t give her his love. Ladli has had her heart broken, so she runs away only to find it waiting for her at the other side. Shayna knows what she wants in a man, but the man she wants is nothing like that and finally, the girl who wants Shayna, actually just needs a friend. Cold Feet is the story of the strangely entwined lives of five women who live in Mumbai and deal differently with the same thing, love.
Domechild
A SUICIDE MACHINE. A CHILD WITH A SECRET THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD. THE MAN TRAPPED BETWEEN THEM.
In the City, where machines take care of everything, lives Albert, an ordinary citizen with an extraordinary problem: He’s being blackmailed into becoming the first person in living memory to actually do something. What begins as a chance encounter with an outlaw child swiftly spirals out of control as Albert is trapped between the authorities and the demands of his unusual blackmailer. Forced to go on the run for his life, he finds himself in a shadow world of cyber-junkies, radicals and rebels, where he discovers the horrifying truth behind the City, a truth that will make him question everything he has ever known.