When Jiya meets Urmila, she sees a loud girl with a fierce expression and too-bright clothes. Urmila sees a snooty girl with a dull dress and no spunk. Can they ever be friends?
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Timmi and Rizu
Timmi’s new friend Rizu is in trouble. Three boys lie in wait for him near the school every day. Timmi, Idliamma and Juju the giant are full of ideas to help him, but will any of them work?
Tiger Boy
Neel’s parents want him to win a scholarship, and go to the big city to study. But Neel doesn’t want to leave his beloved Sundarbans, with its beautiful trees and its magnificent tigers.
And then a tiger cub goes missing from the reserve!
The evil Gupta wants to sell the cub and sets his people to search for it. Neel and his sister Rupa are determined to find the cub and take it to safety before Gupta and his goons find it.
Racing against time, and braving the dangers of the dark, will Neel succeed in saving the little tiger cub?
Winner of South Asia Book Award 2016 and Neev Book Award 2018
‘A multicultural title with obvious appeal for animal-loving middle graders.’ Kirkus Review
‘(An) excellent book, offering adventure, suspense and food for thought, and is surely going to win awards’ Mirrors, Windows and Doors
Petu Pumpkin Cheater Peter
When Petu starts cheating, his friends are sure he is headed for a life of crime. They try everything to stop him–hypnosis, a home-baked truth serum, a D-I-Y polygraph … Will they succeed?
Year of the Weeds
‘Sometimes, Korok, it is best if the sorkar forgets you.’
Korok lives in a small Gond village in Odisha. His life is in the garden he tends every day. Anchita, an artist, lives in the house which has the garden.
One day, the government tells the Gonds they have to leave the village. A company wants to mine the sacred hill next to it for bauxite. The Gonds oppose it, but the government, led by police offi cer Sorkari Patnaik, is sure to win. So is the company.
How long will the Gond resistance last, when politicians, young activists and even Maoists arrive at the village?
What can a lone gardener and a girl with a sketchbook do against the most powerful people in the land?
The Runaways
AN EXPLOSIVE NEW NOVEL THAT ASKS DIFFICULT QUESTIONS ABOUT MODERN IDENTITY IN A WORLD ON FIRE
Anita Rose lives in a concrete block in one of Karachi’s biggest slums, languishing in poverty with her mother and older brother. Determined to escape her stifling circumstances, she struggles to educate herself, scribbling down English words-gleaned from watching TV or taught by her elderly neighbour-in her most prized possession: a glossy red notebook. All the while she is aware that a larger destiny awaits her.
On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city. But Monty wants more than fast cars and easy girls. When the rebellious Layla joins his school, he knows his life will never be the same again.
And far away in Portsmouth, Sunny fits in nowhere. It is only when he meets his charismatic, suntanned cousin Oz-whose smile makes Sunny feel found-that that he realizes his true purpose.
These three disparate lives will cross paths in the middle of a desert, a place where life and death walk hand-in-hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.
Second Thoughts
Maya is pretty, young and eager to escape her middleclass home. Ranjan is handsome, driven, well born and wealthy. Their arranged marriage seems a match made in heaven until Maya discovers that underneath her husband’s charming facade lies a cold-hearted, rigidly conservative monster. As the young woman struggles with her marriage, she meets and finds solace in Nikhil, her charming college-going neighbour. Soon the stage is set for an explosive tale of love and betrayal.
Who Let The Dork Out?
With just 12 months to go before the 2010 Allied
Victory Games in New Delhi, there is pandemonium
at the Ministry for Urban Regeneration and Public
Sculpture.
Preparations are months behind schedule and
minister Badrikedar Laxmanrao Dahake not only
has to deal with an irate PM but also the Lok Sabha,
fiendish investigative journalists, and a relentless
BBC reporter who insists on interviewing him live
in English. Dahake is about to resign when he runs
into an unlikely saviour: international financial
wizard Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese.
The Pregnant King
‘I am not sure that I am a man,’ said Yuvanashva. ‘I have created life outside me as men do. But I have also created life inside me, as women do. What does that make me? Will a body such as mine fetter or free me?’
Among the many hundreds of characters who inhabit the Mahabharata, perhaps the world’s greatest epic and certainly one of the oldest, is Yuvanashva, a childless king, who accidentally drinks a magic potion meant to make his queens pregnant and gives birth to a son. This extraordinary novel is his story.
It is also the story of his mother Shilavati, who cannot be king because she is a woman; of young Somvat, who surrenders his genitals to become a wife; of Shikhandi, a daughter brought up as a son, who fathers a child with a borrowed penis; of Arjuna, the great warrior with many wives, who is forced to masquerade as a woman after being castrated by a nymph; of Ileshwara, a god on full-moon days and a goddess on new-moon nights; and of Adi-natha, the teacher of teachers, worshipped as a hermit by some and as an enchantress by others.
Building on Hinduism’s rich and complex mythology-but driven by a very contemporary sensibility-Devdutt Pattanaik creates a lush and fecund work of fiction in which the lines are continually blurred between men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Confronted with such fluidity the reader is drawn into Yuvanashva’s struggle to be fair to all-those here, those there and all those in between.
Goner
Everyone has a dark, ugly side-some of us just choose to hide it better than others
She’s a young woman going through a mid-twenties crisis, trying to deal with the dark and intoxicating side of life with haunting memories of an abusive ex-boyfriend, remnants of a broken family and obvious mental health issues.
Finding herself on a consistent downward spiral, she tries to grapple with the harsh realities of her existence and her incessant attraction to all things that are bad for her, which ultimately culminate in the form of a medical emergency as she overdoses, leading to a blackout in the middle of a unfamiliar place, a very public meltdown and a broken leg.
With no job, a failing art career, months of expensive therapy, a cast on her leg and a mystery man in her life, will she be able to recover from her embarrassing wastefulness? Can she defeat her infamous trait of self-sabotage and manoeuvre her way through some hard-hitting truths?