Nov 18, 2023 This, the last of BN Goswamy’s books, remains a tribute to the diversity of his scholarship and his love for his son. He passed away on November 17, aged 90
Nov 11, 2023 Japanese detective stories have been gradually infiltrating the consciousness of Indian readers and creating their own waves of effect. The Kamogawa Food Detectives however, puts a different spin on detection
Nov 03, 2023 Seishi Yokomizo’s narrative is extremely detailed and he takes his time in letting the story unfold, travelling back and forth in time as required by the exigencies of the plot. He takes the reader through the complexities of family relationships and social nuances with the sound of the devil’s flute as a leitmotif.
Oct 28, 2023 The stories in Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin’s ‘The Dread of Night: Supernatural Encounters From the British Raj’ are based on the world they saw every day, an India of dak bungalows, deserted bungalows in hill stations, creepy khansamas and khitmatgars, and do-or-die sportsmen.
Oct 28, 2023 Richard Osman does not just stick to a detective story in ‘The Last Devil To Die’. His story also meanders through the troubles of old age and loneliness that plague pensioners even if they do live in a beautiful serene village with friends at hand.
Sep 02, 2023 At one level, Tan Twan Eng's 'The House of Doors' deals with the life of the artist, looking for inspiration desperate to live up to the last success. At another it deals with patriarchy and possession.
Aug 19, 2023 Madhav Gadgil’s ‘A Walk up to the Hill: Living with People and Nature’ has something for everyone. For the nature lover, there are anecdotes of elephants, birds, and histories of various regions. The researcher can rejoice in Gadgil’s detailed notes of his work and meetings.
Jul 30, 2023 Ritu Menon’s ‘India On Their Minds: 8 Women 8 Ideas of India’ features writings by eight women who saw and were affected by the Independence of India and the Partition that accompanied it.
Jul 23, 2023 For Rimli Sengupta’s book 'A Lost People’s Archive', the word 'novel' is a kind of simplistic description for what a complex cross-genre work it is.
Jul 16, 2023 A travel writer by inclination, Zac O'Yeah brings together a series of essays and memoirs that include all the information that he picked up along the way.
Jul 08, 2023 In ‘Filmi Stories’, Kunal Basu seems to have moved away from the dark world that he inhabited in novels like ‘Kalkutta’, while retaining his bent for page-turning description. There are shades of darkness in the book and quite a few corpses but more on the grey side of dark and on the thrilling side of lit fic.
Jul 01, 2023 Rohan Chakravarty’s ‘Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints: A Collection of Green Humour Cartoons’ is the kind of book that should feature in school environmental studies (EVS) courses. It does a great deal to highlight the strained relationship that we share with nature and subtly suggest ways and means of dealing with it.
Jun 24, 2023 The anthology brings together 19 short stories —translated into English from Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, and Urdu— that together demonstrate the wide spectrum of medical cultures in India.
Jun 17, 2023 Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s ‘Soft Animal’ is set during the Covid-19 lockdown and appears like a memoir-meets-fiction kind of a work, notes Anjana Basu.
Jul 10, 2022 Three women with different issues - a sudden widow, an equally sudden divorcee, and a teacher who cannot conceive - form the core of the plot of Aruna Nambiar's new novel 'The Weird Women's Club'.
Jun 04, 2022 In a world obsessed with staying young, one can guess what lies at the heart of the Hidden Hindu. Gupta presses the right buttons of violence, hackers and religious bias with a supervillain and a missing text at the heart of all.
May 21, 2022 Picking up on the title of one of the more spectacular James Bond books, Govind Dholakia, has embarked on the story of how he reached the heights of the diamond business after his birth into a humble agricultural family in a small village in Gujarat.
May 15, 2022 Vini’s past and Jay’s present, are peppered with wise adults and anxious friends, not to mention managing girlfriends who ride on high-income high voltage lifestyles and come and go with increasing frequency.
Apr 09, 2022 Among all the stories, Dean is most intrigued by the location of the Stone Tower. It was somewhere at the Silk Route’s mid-point that was a halting spot for every caravan.
Oct 27, 2021 Anindita Ghose’s The Illuminated is an interwoven narrative between a mother and daughter’s experiences of loss, and an exploration of the different states of loneliness.
Dec 16, 2021 Pride, Prejudice and Punditry gives an insight into the Congress leader’s mind through essays and stories
Oct 10, 2021 Subramaniam chose four who were unsung heroines, with little cult following. They cast off their lives and were very clear about the divide between the material and the spiritual.
Aug 26, 2021 Boston fratboys, coding, start-up spiritual dreams and social media obsession—Tahmima Anam gets up to speed
Aug 27, 2021 Whereabouts is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel after eight years and like In Other Words, it was first written in Italian, the fruit of her language studies in Rome, and then translated into English by the author herself.
Aug 04, 2021 Unpublished stories, translations, rare sketches and a screenplay—three generations of Rays shine with undimmed radiance