Anupama Chandra
A touching story of two Afghanistans
In any war, those who live to tell the tale are usually extraordinarily lucky.
Beaten black & blue with the race bat
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, doesn’t have a sub-head for its title, but it re-wrote itself in my head to include one.
A manual for new feminists
So many unexpected and inspiring things happened in Delhi this past December, that Nivedita Menon’s publishers couldn’t have hoped for a better time to launch her book Seeing Like a Feminist. Bestseller lists show that it’s been doing well — even with the F-word in bold capitals on the cover: a word which has never been popular, and seldom been handed to anyone as a glowing compliment, but still seems to have reached the very nadir of unpopularity in the last few years.
Leading ladies in a bias-cut
By all accounts, the Hindi film industry is one of the toughest in the world, and the women who venture into it must be the toughest in the world as well, but not too many books have been written about them.
Dissing Naipaul, missing friends
To make lists is a dangerous thing, especially if it’s a question of advising people on the one book to stuff into the top of the rucksack they have to drag up an unpromising mountain, or one which is most likely to block out the sound of children trapped at home over the summer. This narrows down the list to books that are unquestionably
Brontes revisited, one sibling at a time
If nothing else, Jude Morgan’s literary daring in taking on the lives of the Bronte sisters as the subject of his most recent novel, The Taste of Sorrow, would have been worthy of praise. It is a story that has been written many times over, and their novels themselves are so famous that most readers have a definite image in their heads of
