It is the 1970s when fourteen-year-old Leela leaves everything behind in her rural town and boards the Malabar train for Adakam in Kasaragod, India. She mistakenly believes she is heading to attend a church feast, but when she arrives, she is horrified to learn that she is about to become the wife of Yacob, a young man who had visited her house a year earlier with his overbearing mother. Naturally devastated, Leela reluctantly prepares for the ceremony. Ordered to give up her education and...

When you are a female born into a poor Indian family, the odds are already stacked greatly against you.Saved by her grandmother from being killed at birth for being a female and abandoned by her mother at a young age, Shilpa Raj faces the formidable constraints placed on her by her family, and the barbs of village elders bound by hundreds of years of oppressive practices and customs that subjugate women in rural India.At the age of four, Shilpa's life veers drastically from...

With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand bought an elephant named Tara and rode her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market. From Bhim, a drink-racked mahout, Shand learned to ride and care for her. From his friend Aditya Patankar he learned Indian ways. And with Tara, his new companion, he fell in love. Travels on My Elephant is the story of their epic journey across India, from packed highways to dusty back roads where communitie...

Sukesh, Sanchita, Kapil and Siddhant die and go to Yamlok, where they meet Yamraj. Yamraj gives them one last chance to become alive again, and they can go back to earth, if they win the game: Island Game of Modern Life. The winner will be resurrected to life and could start life from where it ended. What was the game and who wins? What is a modern life? Is it really true that after people die, Yamraj gives one last chance to them to become alive again?

**The haunting and poignant story of a how a young Japanese girl's understanding of the historic and tragic bombing of Hiroshima is transformed by a memorial lantern-floating ceremony.A Kirkus Reviews Best Middle Grade Book of the Century**Twelve-year-old Nozomi lives in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. She wasn't even born when the bombing of Hiroshima took place. Every year Nozomi joins her family at the lantern-floating ceremony to honor those lost in the bombing...

Writing on the lives of the Mahars of Maharashtra, Baby Kamble reclaims memory to locate the Mahar society before it was impacted by Babasaheb Ambedkar, and tells a consequent tale of redemption wrought by a fiery brand of social and self-awareness. The Prisons We Broke provides a graphic insight into the oppressive caste and patriarchal tenets of the Indian society, but nowhere does the writing descend to self-pity. With verve and colour the narrative brings to life, among other things, the ...

A venerable tiger, old and toothless now, looks back over his life from cubhood and early days roaming wild in the Indian jungle. Trapped into a miserable circus career as 'Raja the magnificent', he is then sold into films (co-starring with a beefy Tarzan in a leopard skin) until, finding the human world too brutish and bewildering, he makes a dramatic bid for freedom.R.K. Narayan's story combines Hindu mysticism with ripe Malgudi comedy, viewing human absurdities through the eyes ...

Kuttiedathi and Other Stories is a careful collection of ten short stories. This collection brings together some of the most well known stories of M T Vasudevan Nair, fairly representative of his literary works. Written over a broad span of time from 1962 to 2000, the stories collected here reflect the built-in variety of his fictional concerns and the changing tones of his narration. M T Vasudevan Nair is a renowned Malayalam author and winner of the Jnanpith award for literature (1995). He...

Inspired by true events, the story of two girls raised by wolvesMohandas lives in the Home, a Christian orphanage in Godamuri, India, close to the jungle. The people of Godamuri beg the orphanage's director, the Reverend Mr. Welles, to get rid of the ghosts, called manush-bagha, haunting their village. When the Reverend investigates, he discovers that the "ghosts" are really two human girls living with a pack of wolves. Mohandas's life is altered forever wh...

This is the true story of a spiritual journey combined with a very real adventure across the Great Himalayas. A journey on foot that began in Dharamsala, Northern India, home of His Holiness Fourteenth Dalai Lama, as well as that of the author. The journey took the form of a 21 day trek across the Kashmir Valley and into the remote area of Zanskar, traversing nine passes all above 4000 metres and ending in the city of Leh, Ladakh. I undertook this journey accompanied by my wife, two guides...

It's 2020 and children are stuck indoors as the novel coronavirus finds its way into India. A nationwide lockdown is announced and amidst the growing crisis, Ajja and Ajji welcome their grandchildren and Kamlu Ajji into their house in Shiggaon.From stitching masks, sharing household chores, preparing food for workers to losing themselves in timeless tales, the lockdown turns into a memorable time for the children as they enter the enchanting world of goddesses, kings, princesses, se...

The story of Chathu, The Elephant Boy was first written and published in Malayalam. The original story was called 'Anakkaran', which means, literally, "elephant man" or mahout. It was written Karoor Nilakanta Pillai and was quite short. Shanta Rameshwar Rao found the story had immense potential for a full length adventure story. In consultation with the author, she added new characters and situations and lengthened the story, although the plot remained the same.