By Keigo Higashino

Rs 350

It is a relief once in a while to get away from the bleak, icy landscape of Nordic crime fiction to an ordinary, urban environment. So, here we are in Tokyo, not in the glitzy Shinjuku district, but in the eastern part of the city with its cramped apartment blocks that overlook cardboard shanties, where ordinary folk go about the business of living quietly and stoically because money is tight and on grey mornings, the Sumida River looks murkier than it really is.

By Romain Hayes

Rs 399

There is an abundance of literature on Subhas Chandra Bose apart from his collected works edited by Sisir and Sugata Bose. His most recent biography, His Majesty’s Opponent, by Sugata Bose, his grand nephew and Harvard historian, has been acclaimed as the finest so far.
Romain Hayes, an independent researcher, has specialised for several years on German foreign policy during the Second World War.

By Aravind Adiga

Rs 699

In his last letter to the Chinese Premier, Balram Halwai, the White Tiger in Adiga’s eponymous novel, writes, “I am thinking of real estate next. You see, I’m always a man who sees ‘tomorrow’ when others see ‘today’.” That was in 2008. Three years later, Balram Halwai has metamorphosed into Dharmen Shah, the Mumbai real estate developer, the chief antagonist in Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in Tower. Balram and

By Maggi Lidchi-Grassi

Rs 999

Since its original narration by Ved Vyasa, this story has been retold “many and many a time again in many guises, in many climes, and what follows now is one of them, written far into Kali Yuga, in its birthplace, Bharatvarsha, right on the cusp of history, as the Light prepares to spread over the earth that has resisted for long”. That is how Maggi Lidchi-Grassi introduces her rendering of the Mahabharata, a dramatic and lyrical retelling of the great epic.

By Anuradha Roy

Rs 495

When we meet Maya, the schoolteacher at St. Hilda’s School in Ranikhet, she has already spent six years in the hill town. “Though I cannot know precisely when it happened, a time had come when I had become a hill-person who was only at peace where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea.”

At its simplest level, Litanies of Dutch Battery is the story of a little girl with a big name, Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita Jessica. The people of Dutch Battery call her Jessica.

Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. His other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in 1759. The first, commonly referred to as the Wealth of Nations, firmly established Smith as the founder of the science of economics, or political economy as it was called in his day.

Soon after Bill Bryson moved into his new home, a former Church of England rectory in an unidentified village in Norfolk, he climbed up to the attic to identify “a slow mysterious drip”.

A game of cricket in the lawns of his house confronts the narrator of this novel, Ashwin, a 12-year-old boy with a dilemma. He has to answer at that very moment whether he is still a child. “No, I am not”, is Ashwin’s defiant response. Thus the story takes off.