If you’re a fan of Chetan Bhagat’s writing (or of Ravinder Singh’s or of Ravi Subramanian’s, etc) then you don’t want to pick up The Mirror of Beauty, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s English rendering of his own Urdu tour de force.

They used to call them torture taxis that carried their high-value human cargo on a mission of extraordinary rendition for enhanced interrogation techniques at places outside the country.

Amitava Kumar’s short biography of Patna, A Matter of Rats, starts with, well, rats. “In my mind’s eye, I watch a train approaching Patna Junction in the early morning.

Reciting the holy Quran is considered an essential aspect of Islamic belief. Scholars insist and the general perception pertains, that the effort should extend to understanding its meaning and essence.

More than halfway through this book, I uncovered why Diva Green is so much better than Ritu Dalmia’s earlier book, Italian Khana.

In any war, those who live to tell the tale are usually extraordinarily lucky.

I must confess that during the first 70-odd pages of The Billionaire’s Apprentice, by international business journalist Anita Raghavan, I found myself cursing the karma of the book reviewer.

A new and updated biography of Hun Sen, Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen, From Pagoda Boy to Prime Minister of Cambodia, written by the Indian academic-author couple Harish and Julie Mehta, has just been released, coinciding with Cambodia’s general elections this month that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won easily.

Not everyone sees the funny side of living with uterine cancer. Not everyone instantly gets jokes about the uterus, the cervix or lymph nodes. But then, not everyone is Eve Ensler. Nor can everyone read a book by Ensler without being shaken to the core.

Sudhanshu Ranjan’s Justice: Judocracy and Democracy in India: Boundaries and Breaches, published by Routledge, is a book which must be compulsory reading for every lawyer and judge in India.