Haryana: Books on and about the land of the Mahabharata War
With the tagline, “Desa mein des Haryana, jit dudh dahi ka khana” (trans. Haryana is one of the best states where people love milk and milk products), Haryana is the Indian state that is known for its achievements in agriculture, industrialization and flourishing art and culture. From being referred to as ‘heaven on earth’ in […]
August 17: An Attempt by S. Hareesh at Alternate History
August 17 is S. Hareesh’s second novel after the JCB Prize-winning novel, Moustache (Meesha). While Meesha carried a mythical character, August 17 is an alternate history. By employing an entirely imaginative historical framework, S. Hareesh reconfigures the history and politics at his disposal. While it is speculative fiction, it revisits the history of the region, […]
Charming debut for the ageless middle-class India by Aravind Jayan
The debut novel of Bangalore-based writer Aravind Jayan, Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, is a hilariously narrated, small-town family drama. On the day that a family from middle-class India brings home a brand new white Honda Civic, they discover that a filmed video of their eldest son, twenty-two-year-old Sreenath, and his girlfriend of four years, Anita, […]
Indira Gandhi, Bibliophiles and Love: Once Upon a Curfew
In 1974, twenty-three-year-old Indu (named after India’s then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi), inherits a sprawling four-bedroom flat from her grandmother. Given that the house is filled with more than a thousand books that her grandparents had lovingly collected over the years, Indu decides to turn it into a local library exclusively for women—a dedicated space […]
Villainy by Upamanyu Chatterjee is a mirror of the India we live in
One early morning, casual walkers in a Delhi neighbourhood find a corpse on their usual morning walk route. Nobody knows who it is or where it has come from. Thus begins Villainy, the new novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee, published by Speaking Tiger. Spanning two decades, the story takes us back to Parmatma and Pukhraj — […]
Avinuo Kire gives us a peek into Naga Life and Culture in her latest book
The latest book by Kohima-based writer and teacher, Avinuo Kire, Where the Cobbled Path Leads (Penguin, 2022) is a folk fantasy novel. Eleven-year-old Vime is struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother as well as her father’s impending marriage to another woman. She frequently visits a cobbled path close to her […]
A Crime Thriller Book by Jaishankar Krishnamurthy and Krishna Udayasankar
How well do we actually know the people, who we claim are close to us? Can we ever know a person completely or are there always few remanences of a person’s life buried deep inside? These are some interesting questions that the crime thriller book Farside presents to the table. Written by a husband and […]
