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The Hope Factory
An international event: a remarkable first novel of modern India, weaving together a rich tapestry of social manners and mores, ambition, greed, and love, which will establish Lavanya Sankaran as one of the most gifted and original writers of fiction today. Bangalore: where innocence, deceit and love collide Anand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well-married, rich. At least, that's how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find. Kamala, Anand's family's maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anand's wife: a woman to whom whims come easily. But Kamala's son keeps bad company. Anand's marriage is in trouble. And the murky world where crime and land and politics meet is a dangerous place for a good man, particularly one on whom the wellbeing of so many depends.
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The Red Carpet: Every Family has a Story
Wry humor and a delicious grasp of the friction between generations in Bangalore are the hallmarks of Lavanya Sankarans fresh, deeply nuanced debut collection. A potpourri of beggars and billionaires and determinedly laid-back ways, Bangalore, Indias own Silicon Valley, is a crucible for prosperity, and at the chaotic crossroads between past and present. Here, American-trained professionals like Tara return to their old-fashioned families with heads full of Quentin Tarantino dialogue; a successful entrepreneur is shaken when his partner suddenly reneges on their plan to return to America; a traditional Indian mother slyly circumvents her Western-educated daughters resistance to marriage; a neighborhood gossip is determined to discover what goes on behind the closed curtains of the hip young couple across the street; a chauffeur must reconcile his more orthodox credos with his employers miniskirt lifestyle. Witty, affectionate, and wonderfully wise, Lavanya Sankarans first collection attests to her remarkable literary talent.