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 […]
Meeting Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi in this historical fiction novel
The Map and The Scissors is a searing portrayal of the lives of two powerful men, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The two men, a ‘scaffold of bones’ in appearance, were unbreakable with a steely resolve. Both dreamt of freedom from British rule but in irreconcilably different ways. An incisive analysis of their […]
The Artists Become the Muses: Books About Movies You Must Read
Love films? Why not give these 8 books about movies a chance and dive into the good, the glamourous, and the down right scandalous world of the film industry? It would not be wrong to say that literature and cinema are two sides of the same coin. The tradition of adapting books to screen goes […]
Why The Henna Artist deserves to be a New York Times Bestseller
Enter a world of post-Independence Jaipur and royalty, following a young woman’s quest for freedom in this New York Times Bestseller by Alka Joshi. In the 1950s, a seventeen year old Lakshmi flees an abusive marriage from her rural village, Ajar in Uttar Pradesh. She goes to work in Agra for three years, where the […]
The Stars are His Bones: A photography-haiku book you cannot miss
Haiku inspired by the Upanishads, photographs that capture Calcutta. One written by an Irish poet in Irish and English, one clicked by an Indian photographer. Seemingly disconnected dots are joined beautifully by Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock and Kolkata-based photographer Debiprasad Mukherjee, whose latest collaboration, The Stars are His Bones, a photography-haiku collection that takes the […]
