There’s something so very different about this long winding novel — Hostage Three — by Nick Lake.

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.

On March 13th this year a new name suddenly burst into the news wires all over the world. Against all expectations, a South American and a Jesuit had been elected as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, the international media screened all the possible sources of information about the Argentinean whose name few people could spell out or pronounce.

There are novels which change the way you perceive life. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third and most nuanced novel Americanah does exactly that.

Rs 199

Karishma Attari

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.

Writing one’s life is a striptease act: you are exposed to hundreds of eyes watching you uncover your naked self,” Prabha Khaitan in A Life Apart.

4th Estate, `399

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.

LeftWord Books, `750

DVeeraraghavan’s book, The Making of the Madras Working Class, is the history of plebeian cogs in society’s wheel — the labour class and its struggle for survival in Madras from 1918 to 1939.

Rs 495

Hemangani Devi moved to Benares when her gentrified husband, Shyam Shankar Chowdhury, chief minister in the court of Jhalawar, took up with a Miss Morrell, “his second wife”, observes Robu — as Ravi Shankar was widely called among family and friends.

Diplomat-writer Vikas Swarup, who is posted as the consul-general in Osaka, does not want to be a full-time author, saying he wants to continue writing part-time and work full time as an Indian diplom