Karishma Attari
What you expect is not what you get
Most accounts of pregnancy would follow the opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And Lalita Iyer brings her experience as a journalist and magazine editor to put the zip and pep into talking about a condition that despite its flounce and cute appeal, can be quite a downer.
Celebrating women of substance
One might be ill advised to judge a book by its cover, but Urmila Pawar’s collection of short stories could not have come with a more descriptive title.
Sweet endings that linger on
Meghna Pant’s short stories stick like burrs. They are small, dramatic pieces that hook into the skin with urgent claims that are not easy to resolve or brush off. In Dented and Painted Women, a dying, repentant widower offers a live-in prostitute a chance at redemption.
Same old in the US of A
The theme of young men going off to faraway places to make their fortune is as old to the novel as, well, the novel itself. You see it in Henry Fielding’s 1749 book, Tom Jones, where loosely plotted picaresque adventures and a coming-of-age story added up to the first detectable sign of something new: a novel.
Shades of the city in pretty young lives
There are cities within cities and we live out the span of our lives within those cities. It takes national celebrations or local catastrophes to jar us into noticing people that live outside our cocoon; a World Cup win or candlelight vigil are occasions to acknowledge our neighbours.
Stitching together a world of echoes
The Lost Girl is based on an intriguing futuristic idea — What if we could create copies of the people we love? Life is eminently unpredictable, but having an authentic copy of a loved one might take the sting away from sudden loss.
Ordinary yet extraordinary
It is a well-known precept that all good fiction is about change. What makes From the Eye of my Mind such an interesting read is that its narrator is an 18-year-old high functioning autistic girl, hence not a person particularly enthusiastic to change. T.G.C. Prasad writes the resulting tension with skill; he offers a glimpse into the workings of an uncommonly rare mind and tells a story that might have succumbed to sentimentality in the hands of a less sensitive writer.
A desi Cinderella in America
Old Mills & Boon style romances never die; they just fade away to return in new packaging.
Marvellous stories of the soil retold
Storytelling draws its water from a well that runs deeper than fiction. Janice Pariat’s debut collection of short stories, Boats on Land, does not feel ingenious and inventive as much as it rings true of stories of the soil.
Melange of convicts & TV crew
Documentary makers may profess neutrality, but author Nikita Lalwani calls that bluff in her unsettling and acute novel about three British BBC filmmakers in an Indian open prison. The Village features a rarity in the penal system — a chance for convicted murderers to live with their families, work outside their quarters, and display civic responsibility.
