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The Temple And The Mosque
Premchand's fiction has been translated before, but seldom did these translations reveal the many facets of his literary genius, nor did they show the wide variety of 'types' he was capable of portraying. For, Premchand wrote not only about villains and martyrs, poverty, rigid social order or caste disparities. His world, seemingly black and white though it is, is also lit by flashes of wit and humour, gentle irony and a persistent social commentary. While Premchand's favourite characters – bhang-drinking pandits, miserable sweepers and arrogant Thakurs – do feature in this collection, this is perhaps the first time that the English reader will be introduced to his 'other' world – a world of unbelievably good men, lovesick young girls, and a penniless braggart's self-delusion. About the Author Premchand (1880–1936) is regarded as among the finest of writers in Hindi and Urdu. His first collection of stories, Soz-e-Watan (1908), was banned for being incendiary and seditious. Undaunted, he kept writing stories that expressed the pain and suffering of the toiling masses. Some of his best writings portray the influence of Gandhi and the Russian revolution in his choice of subjects: widow remarriage, dowry, untouchability, the rich–poor divide, the problems of landless labour, and the inequalities of the caste system. br>Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and editor. Her debut collection of short stories Release and Other Stories was published by HarperCollins in August 2011
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The Time Of My Life
The stunning and magical new novel from the Number One bestselling author Lying on Lucy Silchester s carpet one day when she returns from work is a gold envelope. Inside is an invitation to a meeting with Life. Her life. It turns out she s been ignoring it and it needs to meet with her face to face. It sounds peculiar, but Lucy s read about this in a magazine. Anyway, she can t make the date: she s much too busy despising her job, skipping out on her friends friends and avoiding her family. But Lucy life isn t what it seems. Some of the choices she s made – and stories she s told – aren t what they seem either. From the moment she meets the man who introduces himself as her life, her stubborn half-truths are going to be revealed in all their glory unless Lucy learns to tell the truth about what really matters to her. Lucy Silchester has an appointment with her life – and she s going to have to keep it. Touching, warm, funny and poignant, Cecelia Ahern s new novel explores what happens when you stop paying attention to your life. About The Author Before embarking on her writing career, Cecelia Ahern completed a degree in journalism and media studies. Her first novel, PS, I Love You was one of the biggest-selling debut novels of 2004 and a number one bestseller. Her successive bestselling novels are Where Rainbows End, If You Could See Me Now, A Place Called Here, Thanks for the Memories, The Gift and The book of Tomorrow. PS, I Love You, starring Hilary Swank, was a box office hit. Cecelia has also co-created the hit American television comedy series Samantha Who? In 2008 Cecelia won the award for Best New Writer at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards. Cecelia lives in County Dublin.
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Wicked Women Of The Raj
"Wicked Women Of The Raj is an unputdownable factual account of the zenana world of the rajas and sultans of India; concentrating on the firangi bahus and begums of this veiled world of myths and folklores. The book gives us the stories of twenty different European women who broke society's rules to marry the 'heathen' Indian princes. Who were these women? Were they gold-diggers; or hopeless romantics hoping to enact their own Cinderella fairytale? Did they live happily ever after? Set against the backdrop of India's independence struggle; the book has a delicious and potent mix of flavours - the end of the British Raj and the downfall of the pompous and extravagant Indian aristocracy."
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New Indian Fiction
New Indian Fiction : Contemporary Writing In this unparalleled collection of short stories, The HarperCollins Book of New Indian Fiction presents an absorbing view of one of the most fertile literary landscapes in the world. Traversing continents and orbits, styles and themes, in rich, original and frequently surprising ways, the stories testify to the range and depth of Indian writing in English. Variously lyric, satiric, tragic and fantastic, they are unified in their vigour and humanity. T The anthology features a rich assortment of voices from both new authors and established names including Abraham Verghese, Manju Kapur, Githa Hariharan and Amitava Kumar. With an insightful introduction by Khushwant Singh, one of India’s foremost literary personalities, this is the definitive survey of a lively modern scene.
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Women & Men In My Life
What can you expect when Khushwant Singh irrepressible as ever, cuttingly candid and provocatively truthful decides to write about some of the women and men in his life? An unputdownable volume, which spans his life and his long, chequered career, in which he reminisces about the people he has met, befriended and fallen out with. The list includes film makers, politicians, industrialists, lawyers, civil servants, writers as well as other relatively unknown personalities
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A Shot At History
Abhinav Bindra once shot 100 out of in practice six timesin a row and walked out of the range unhappy. He is aperfectionist, who once soled his shoes with rubber fromFerrari tyres because he thought it would help. He wouldwake up at 3 am. to practice at his range at home if an ideasuddenly struck him. It is from such an incredibleobsession that greatness arrives.But Abhinav Bindra's journey to become the first Indian to win an individual Olympic gold,and the first Indian to win a World Championship gold, is far more than that. It is a triumphborn of a tragedy. Having driven himself to become a great shooter, he was poised to wingold at the Athens Olympics in 2004. But defeated by a freak occurrence, he changed as ashooter: from a boy who loved shooting, he became an athlete bent on redemption,becoming a scientist who would try anything, including mapping his own brain, to win inBeijing.
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Aleph
The Aleph is an encounter with our fears and our sins; a search for love and forgiveness, and the courage to confront the inevitable challenges of life. Aleph marks a return to Paulo Coelho’s beginnings. Facing a grave crisis of faith, and seeking a path of spiritual renewal and growth, Paulo decides to start over: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the world. On this journey through Europe, Africa, and Asia, he will again meet Hilal—the woman he loved 500 years before—an encounter that will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, through past and present, in search of an opportunity to rewrite his own destiny.
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The Emperor Of All Maladies
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer' . Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting and magisterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.
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The Vague Woman's Handbook
They are bad with directions; they never know when the credit card bill is due. They have perfected the art of turning over a new leaf tomorrow. Meet the vague women in this delightful first novel that doesn’t star a woman looking for the right man – because she’s already found him! At twenty-two, Sharmila Chatterjee has just married her sweetheart of a few years, Abhimanyu Mishra, a somewhat eccentric if handsome twenty-three-and-a-half year old with obscure academic interests and a small fellowship that never arrives on time. They start a household in a tiny rented flat, learning to fend for themselves in the big, bad and snotty world of south Delhi, with penny-pinching landlords, some romance, and a lot of anxiety. At fifty-two, Indira Sen is not sure just how she meandered to where she finds herself now. A senior government officer and single mother, she lives with her daughter and three opinionated old people in a rambling house, drives a battered car, and has a history of credit-card induced shopaholism. The Vague Woman’s Handbook is a story told with equal parts of humour, hysteria and tenderness, about the sparkling friendship between two women as they hurtle through life and its mini-crises while trading secrets in the art of survival.
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Tanzeem
Deep in Waziristan, the Ameer-ul-Momineem, a powerful terrorist warlord, embarks on a deadly mission to take the jihad across international borders. To carry out his horrific plan, he puts together the Tanzeem, a group of leaders spread across the continents. Supporting him are the Mullah in Quetta and the Director of Pakistan’s ISI. Or do they have their own agendas? Across the border in India, a young man named Iqbal, devastated by the death of his wife at the hands of the Ameer’s henchmen, sets out with a singular focus – to find the Ameer and take him down. Supporting him is the spirited Force 22, India’s strike action team. Will Iqbal be able to stop the jihadi terror machine in time? Find out in this taut, thrilling finale to the Lashkar series, where India’s literary storm trooper, Mukul Deva, tells us how the scourge of terrorism began and where it is likely to end.
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Faith & Fire
Hailed as the Indian version of The Celestine Prophecy, this is the true story of a young couple’s yearning for a meaningful life. Madhu and Rajeev left the city to join a small community in the Himalayas. For seven years they lived under the tutelage of Aropa, an Englishman who had taken sanyas (renunciation). Madhu and Rajeev grew their own food, built their own mountain hut, and lived a truly simple life, all under Aropa’s spiritual leadership. The couple followed his philosophy, believing that every experience is viewed as an opportunity to grow. Over time, questions arose that made Madhu and Rajeev’s life perplexing; doors appeared to close on them, and their personal dilemmas peaked. But through it all, they never gave up hope. Their story speaks to the spirit as it lays bare a struggle to transcend suffering and discover what lies beyond it. By sharing the simple practices that intensified their search, as well as the powerful role of dreams, Madhu Tandan offers us her conviction that there are no dead ends in life; and gives us a glimpse of the mysterious, magical, uplifting support we can receive at every step of such a journey.
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Battle For Bittora
Twenty-five-year-old Jinni lives in Mumbai, works in a hip animation studio and is perfectly happy with her carefree and independent existence. Until her bossy grandmother shows up and announces that it is Jinni s 'duty' to drop everything and come and contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from their sleepy hometown, Bittora. Of course Jinni swears she won't. But she soon ends up swathed in cotton saris and frumpy blouses, battling prickly heat, corruption and accusations of nymphomania as candidate Sarojini Pande, a daughter of the illustrious Pande dynasty of Pavit Pradesh. And if life isn t fun enough already, her main opposition turns out to be Bittora ex-royal, Zain Altaf Khan an irritatingly idealistic though undeniably lustworthy individual with whom Jinni shares a complicated history... Enlivened by Chauhan s characteristic brand of wicked humour and sexy romanticism, this is a rollicking new tale of young India.
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Keep Off The Grass
What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street? You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course. Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead. Samrat's rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades and self-confidence plummet. Soon, Samrat's quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn't planned on visiting prison, for example and makes him do things he hadn't banked on doing: 'meditating' stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares. Does Samrat Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead survive his fall from grace?
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The Taking
On the morning that will mark the end of the world they have known, Molly and Niel Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof. It has haunted their sleep, invaded their dreams, and now they rise to find a luminous silvery downpour drenching their small California mountain town. A strange scent hangs faintly in the air, and the young couple cannot shake the sense of something wrong. As hours pass and the rain continues to fall, Molly and Niel listen to disturbing news of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. Before evening, their little town loses television and radio reception. Then telephone and the Internet are gone. With the ceaseless rain now comes an obscuring fog that transforms the once-friendly village into a ghostly labyrinth. By nightfall the Sloans have gathered with some of their neighbors to deal with community damage…but also because they feel the need to band together against some unknown threat, some enemy they cannot identify or even imagine. In the night, strange noises arise, and at a distance, in the rain and the mist, mysterious lights are seen drifting among the trees. The rain diminishes with the dawn, but a moody gray-purple twilight prevails. Soon Molly, Niel, and their small band of friends will be forced to draw on reserves of strength, courage, and humanity they never knew they had. For within the misty gloom they will encounter something that reveals in a terrifying instant what is happening to their world—something that is hunting them with ruthless efficiency. Epic in scope, searingly intimate and immediate in perspective, THE TAKING is an adventure story like no other, a relentless roller-coaster read that brings apocalypse to Main Street and showcases the talents of one of our most original and mesmerizing novelists at the pinnacle of his powers.
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Married But Available
The first ten years are the most eventful, they say, in anybody's working life. They certainly are in the case of Abbey, who walks into a job at Balwanpur Industries, fresh from B-school. Working in HR is fun, he soon discovers. What isn'tis the fact that there's hardly anybody in the company who doesn't have a view of who Abbey is and what Abbey does-or should do. Add to this the complications of being newly married to a woman more successful than he is, a crusty boss, and a sudden turn in the company's fortunes that catches Abbey unawares. It's up to him now, to apply all that HR wisdom learnt in business school to the dilemmas confronting him at work and in love. Can he hold down his job or will it end the way his marriage threatens to-rapidly and without too many regrets?
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Inspired India
Zara Murao is news editor with the Hindustan Times in Mumbai. A graduate in literature from Sophia College, University of Mumbai, she earlier worked with the Indian Express, heading the city desk there and later at HT. She has written several travelogues for both newspapers and worked on a number of special series.