Burnt Shadows – Kamila Shamsie

Nice, very nice. Kamila Shamsie is definitely an author to watch out for. Burnt Shadows has been receiving good reviews since its launch early this year and it has done pretty well in India too.  We have some great literature coming out from our neighbourhood which is very encouraging.
In terms of scope Kamila has used a [...]

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The Finger Puppet – Anu Jayanth

Reading The Finger Puppet on the heels of Lost Flamingoes of Bombay,  was very reassuring - all is not lost with Indian writing.  Which brings me to my pet peeve - that authentic and deserving writers rarely get nominated for those awards. Shashi Deshpande’s In the Country of Deceit was the Indian nominee for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize recently and Siddharth Shangvi’s book has also been nominated for [...]

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Tunnel Vision – Shandana Minhas

I have started to widen my reading just to keep myself aware of what is else is out there. I looked at books coming out of our neighbours including Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. I read ‘Shodh’ by Taslima, ‘The Match’ by Romesh Gunesekera and ‘Turtle Nest’ by Chandani Lokuge. Amidst all the clamour about Taslima and her being bundled [...]

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Such a Long Journey – Rohinton Mistry

‘Family Matters’ was my first taste of Rohinton Mistry and I have been hooked since. A master story teller, he grips the reader with easy paced narrative, one rarely feels tedium. There is always a shadow of gloom in his books, and that is what gives it the sense of realism and the need for [...]

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Mistress – Anita Nair

I have had several mails on why I have stopped posting here. No particular reason, just that I wanted to find the right book to write about. So here goes, this is one my favourite writers of all time. The High Priestess of contemporary Indian Writing in English, Anita Nair is one of the greatest writers of our [...]

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A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

Like my clan, the Syrian Christians, the Parsis are an interesting community. In the south, we are not as exposed to other communities like people in Mumbai or Delhi. Prior to Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Family Matters’ my understanding of Parsis was limited to knowing that one of my colleagues in Mumbai was one and looking at [...]

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Elvis, Raja Stories

I am moving to another genre today – short stories. My biggest complaint about airports in this country is the lack of good book stores in any of them. More about that later. I was almost in panic, I had miscalculated the amount of reading material I had packed. I felt that since it was [...]

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Half of a Yellow Sun

A stunning book that I hesitated to buy because of all the hype around it. Pardon me, I am a little sceptical when there is a lot of buzz around new books. I regret having bought Red Carpet, Inheritance of Loss, House of Blue Mangoes, Babyji among others. S had picked up the book and convinced me [...]

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Night of the Dark Trees – Abraham Eraly

There are times when one finds gems hidden away without the fanfare of glitzy launches and high profile book readings (yawn). This book was one such, unsung, unheard with nary a ripple in the literary world. Even the cover is dark and moody and the back-of-the-book description does no justice to this superb novel. May [...]

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Ever since I read “The Kite Runner”, I was quite sure that I would definitely read Khaled Hosseini’s next book, whenever it came. I was a tad disappointed when I read the introduction at the back that said it deals with two women and their evolving relationship in the backdrop of the Afghan war. First of [...]

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