At the age of eleven, Triton goes to work as a houseboy to Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed with the island’s disappearing reef. It was the biggest house he had ever seen. People from all over the world came here-to sell their wares, to talk, to live; for this was where life took place. Even the sun would rise from the garage and sleep behind the del tree at night. But beyond Mister Salgado’s house and their Sri Lankan village, there is a world falling apart, and it is in this world that Triton must become a man. An absolute classic, Reef is a luminous coming-of-age novel.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Chandimangal
The Chandimangal of Kavikankan Mukundaram Chakravarti is an exemplary work of epic scale that recounts the story of the Goddess Chandi’s constant battle to establish her cult among humans. Through the three books of the kavya-The Book of the Gods, The Book of the Hunter and The Book of the Merchant-we are introduced to Chandi in all her manifestations, from the benevolent to the wrathful, from Abhaya to Chamunda.
Mukundaram’s captivating tales and vivid imagery bring together the enchanting world of the gods with the more challenging world of the mortals while critiquing sixteenth-century Bengali society. In his exquisite rendering of the Chandimangal, Edward Yazijian manages to capture not only the performative and humorous but also the reverent aspects of the text.
My Sainted Aunts
The day Mayadevi turned sixty-eight, seventy or seventy-five years old (her date of birth was an ever-changing fact linked to her moods), she decided to go to London.’
Thus begins Bulbul Sharma’s delightful collection of stories about her aunts, young and old, tetchy and unpredictable, brave and exasperating. One aunt thinks nothing of leaving her village to walk up high mountains in search of peace and shelter, another ends up with a husband who cannnot cope with the daily humiliation of having to look up a his tall wife, and a third enters service in a palace that every day sinks a little deeper into the pond beneath its foundation.
Illuminated by a vast compassion for the travails of women struggling to cope with changing lifestyles and traditions, My Sainted Aunts is as much an insight into the lif of a lost generation as it is a rollicking read.
The Book of Avatars and Divinities
In the Hindu universe, gods and goddesses play freely among human beings to help them, nudge them towards the right action and mete out justice. They may appear to us as avatars in human form or manifest themselves as forces of nature. The many myths of Hinduism become colourful and entertaining when Shiva, Vishnu and Devi take different forms to enact their rivalries, destroy demons and teach devotees with superpowers a lesson in humility.
This first-of-its-kind book brings together the major deities of the Hindu pantheon, describing the different manifestations by which they are recognized, celebrated and worshipped-from Durga to Sita to Kali, and from Narasimha to Parashurama to Krishna. The contributions by Bulbul Sharma, Namita Gokhale, Nanditha Krishna, Parvez Dewan, Royina Grewal and Seema Mohanty offer enchanting stories about our favourite divinities.
Love And Longing In Bombay
In these five haunting stories Vikram Chandra paints a remarkable picture of Bombay—its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries—while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit.
The stories are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant, who, on each of five evenings, recounts an extraordinary tale to those seated around him in a smoky Bombay bar. In ‘Shakti’, two feuding business families are united by a forbidden passion; in ‘Dharma’, a soldier forced to save his life through a terrible act of self-mutilation returns to his home in Bombay to find it haunted by the spirit of a small boy; in ‘Karma’, a police inspector takes on a murder case and finds himself drawn further into spiralling layers of corruption and deceit.
Tightly controlled and luminously written, this outstanding collection confirms Vikram Chandra as one of today’s most exciting writers.
Cutting For Stone
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles-and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
Cutting For Stone
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
Red Earth And Pouring Rain
In Vikram Chandra’s astonishing first novel, the gods Hanuman, Ganesha and Yama descend on a house in an Indian city to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey. A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live.The result is Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a tale of nineteenth century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta and the birth of a luminous child; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone ‘mad with poetry’. And woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, totally modern narrative, the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends and his eventual return to his homeland.
Sacred Games
WINNER OF THE HUTCH CROSSWORD BOOK AWARD 2006 FOR BEST WORK IN ENGLISH FICTION Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional richness and power. Vikram Chandra’s novel draws the reader deep into the life of Inspector Sartaj Singh, and into the criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India. This is a sprawling, magnificent story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side. Drawing on the best of Victorian fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and Chandra’s years of first-hand research on the streets of Mumbai, Sacred Games reads like a potboiling page-turner but resonates with the intelligence and emotional depth of the best of literature.
Fugitive Histories
A prophetic and incisive novel on the persisting fault lines between communities
Remembering her late husband, Asad, Mala relives the heady days of love and optimism they had shared, while she struggles to understand how the world around them has changed so radically. Their daughter, Sara, embarks on a journey that takes her to Ahmedabad, where-across a lately created ‘border’-she meets Yasmin, a survivor of mayhem. Together, Sara and Yasmin search for the future, for hope, amid lives caught in a mesh of memory and anguish.
Marked by an astonishing clarity of observation and deep compassion, Fugitive Histories exposes the legacy of prejudice that continues to erupt into hatred and violence in present-day India.