As I read this true-life story (I really could not figure out where the author fictionalised it, so seamless it was) I remembered a few young couples I met six months ago in a secret shelter run by an NGO in Delhi. Very young, frightened but overjoyed to be together, hiding from their families yet missing them — any one of them could have met the fate of Manoj and Babli.

Rs 399

SUNRITA SEN

It is a brave attempt that Sonora Jha makes in her debut novel Foreign — to weave the much under-reported tragedy of farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region into a romantic tale spanning continents.

There were Hindus and Muslims — but there were also Parsis and Christians when “India cracked” in 1947. Bapsi Sidhwa grew up in Lahore and has spent most of her life in the United States. Her novels — including India Cracked, also published as Ice Candy Man and filmed as Deepa Mehta-directed Earth — and her latest collection of short stories draw heavily on the young Parsi girl’s experiences during the tumultuous days of Partition and its immediate aftermath as well as the South Asian immigrant’s exposure to the United States.

By Hilary Mantel

Rs 399

SUNRITA SEN

A king who married six times, and changed how religion was practised in England as a fallout of his search for marital bliss; a king who beheaded men and women at will and at the same time heralded some drastic but positive changes in governance.

SUNRITA SEN

Romesh Gunesekera’s novel The Prisoner of Paradise is set in the island of Mauritius — a meeting point of Asia and Africa controlled by European colonists — at a time when it is going through great upheaval.

Hari Kunzru literally drove into his latest novel. On a fellowship at the New York Public Library to research and write a book based on India, Kunzru found he was going nowhere, getting nervous, when friends in Los Angeles suggested a road trip to the Mojave desert.

Quicksilver stream of childhood with its sunlit ripples, occasional dark eddies. Some day as an adult one remembers a snatch of conversation, a shadowy movement, half heard, part seen in a way only a child can. Those memory swirls reveal stories, mysteries that are understandable only now though blurred by

By Alice Albinia

Rs 499

Set in contemporary Delhi with mythological undertones, Alice Albinia’s first novel, Leela’s Book, is, with respect to Ganesha, a rollercoaster ride.
Like the Mahabharata where it finds its inspiration, Leela’s Book is about complex relationships — between siblings, parents and their offspring, husband and wife, lovers, about enmity and loss, revenge, retribution and restitution.

A coming of age story set in a co-education boarding school, Arjun Rao’s debut novel Third Best is an unwinder.

A coming of age story set in a co-education boarding school, Arjun Rao’s debut novel Third Best is an unwinder.