'Lawyer-turned-author Simran Dhir's debut novel is the exciting airport read we often need in our lives.' -- The Telegraph'This sharp, acute and accomplished debut novel ... carries deep insights into human relationships and the social schisms and fault lines that surround us.' -- Namita GokhaleGayatri Mehra is tired of her parents trying to find her a suitable husband. She would much rather focus on the history journal she edits a...

A **NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERA REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK"Captivated me from the first chapter to the final page."—Reese Witherspoon**Vivid and compelling in its portrait of one woman’s struggle for fulfillment in a society pivoting between the traditional and the modern, The Henna Artist opens a door into a world that is at once lush and fascinating, stark and cruel...

Early one morning, on the lawns of a grand boulevard in central Delhi, a group of professionals are attending their therapeutic Laughing Club when a 20-foot apparition of the Goddess Kali apppears, and strikes one of their number dead.The goddess disappears without trace, and soon news of the crime has all India agog. For the victim is celebrated sceptic and rationalist Dr Suresh Jha, enemy of all gurus and mystics, and he has been silenced in a manner calculated to unnerve even hi...

‘We are like toys—someone presses our “ON” button, or turns a key in our backsides, and we Santhals start beating rhythms on our tamak and tumdak, or blowing tunes on our tiriyo while someone snatches away our very dancing grounds. Tell me, am I wrong?’In this collection of stories, set in the fecund, mineral-rich hinterland and the ever-expanding, squalid towns of Jharkhand, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar breathes life into a set of characters who are as robustly flesh ...

Abandoned as a young child, Kalu, a cheeky street kid, has against all odds carved out a life for himself in rural India. In the quiet village of Hastinapore, Kalu makes friends: Bal, the solitary buffalo boy, and Malti, a gentle servant girl, who, with her mistress, Ganga Ba, has watched out for Kalu from the first day.Perched high in the branches of a banyan tree, Kalu chooses a leaf, rolls it tightly and, doing what he's done for as long as he can remember, blows through it. His...

What happens when you have to choose between faith and logic? Temples are places of worship, oceans of tranquillity, or so everyone thinks, till a series of murders threatens to destroy the carefully cultivated reputation of the royal family of Thiruvanathapuram. And when fingers point towards the opening of the hitherto sealed vaults at the Padmanabha Swamy Temple that is under the control of the royals, all hell breaks loose. Meanwhile, a heist at the Wafi Mall in Dubai leads investigato...

"Startlingly good" stories of Nepali society set against the backdrop of violent Maoist insurgencies ( San Francisco Chronicle).From an author like "a Buddhist Chekhov," The Royal Ghosts features characters trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces at work in Nepali society ( San Francisco Chronicle). As political violence rages, these people struggle with their duties to their aging parents, an oppressive caste system, and t...

"Spiritual" dialogues usually aim to guide the seeker towards enlightenment, towards escape from identification as a suffering individual. In Being: The Bottom Line, however, Nathan Gill points out that "enlightenment" only appears significant from the viewpoint of "me" - it's only the story of "me" that requires enlightenment. Your true nature is Being, and Being is already all that is (even when there is seeming ignorance of that), with no requirements whatsoever.

An anthology of short stories that master film-maker Satyajit Ray adapted into films.A rich zamindar has a dream that his daughter-in-law is an incarnation of Kali; a clerk's life turns upside down when he stumbles upon a magical stone which can turn any base metal into gold; a housewife steps out of her lowermiddle-class household into the big city to work as a salesgirl,and is awestruck by its labyrinthine ways; blessed with three magical boons from the king of ghosts, Goopy and Bagha fi...

Samrat Upadhyay’s new collection vibrates at the edges of intersecting cultures. Journalists in Kathmandu are targeted by the government. A Nepali man studying in America drops out of school and finds himself a part of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white American woman moves to Nepal and changes her name. A Nepali man falls in love with a mysterious foreign black woman. A rich kid is caught up in his own fantasies of poverty and bank robbery. In the title story, a powerful woman, the...

Through the Ages, women the world over, have lived under subjugation; women in India have been subjected to various atrocities as well. Nonetheless, despite the odds stacked against them, many have become shining examples for others to follow; not for them the phrase: Frailty thy name is woman.So it is with the characters, whose stories appear on the pages of this book. Their names may be ordinary, but their show of resilience is extraordinary.Kavita, Pushpa, Poonam, Deepa,...

Stories of Gopal, the jester, are enjoyed much in the same way as those of Birbal and Tenali Ramakrishna. This book recounts some of the humorous anecdotes of Gopal, the chief jester in the court of Maharaja Krishna Chandra of Bengal. Many stories are told of how the Maharaja tries to outwit the Nawab and how Gopal assists in these endeavours. In every story, it is Gopal who emerges the hero.