Inspired by the legend of Abu Hathim, aging don of Vanity Bagh, Imran Jabbari and his friends form a gang called 5½ Men in their mohalla of Vanity Bagh. They are hired to dispense a batch of stolen scooters to different corners of the city; not until the city rocks with scooter bombs does Imran realize that they have been involved in a terrorist act. One of the prime accused in the 11/11 serial blasts, Imran is destined to live in captivity for the next fourteen years. He kills time plotti...

Meet Hasina Mansoor, vending machine attendant at the Airport Departure Lounge. From her vantage point, Hasina watches the planes take off outside the glass doors and secretly dreams of being on (even piloting) one of them. While selling overpriced tea isn't getting her any closer to that, Hasina keeps her spirits up by making friends (and enemies) among the other airport staff, including the treacherous Cookie Lady, the know-it-all Coupon Man, the beautiful Natasha Singh and her tasbih-wi...

A few months after a state of Emergency has been clamped on India, Raj Iyer, a fledgling journalist living in the alley of the Vicks mango tree, goes underground, to resurface some years later in a corner of the Municipal Park as a bronze statue. No one's sure exactly why he has become so famous, though there is talk of a book being written on him, which hails him as a modern hero of Mangobaag. The Vicks Mango Tree is the story of the tiny fictional region of Mangobaag -- and India -- as s...

'Today I got appointed at the airport. It's a wonderful world and a wonderful job. Thank you.'Meet Hasina Mansoor, vending machine attendant at the Airport Departure Lounge. From her vantage point, Hasina watches the planes take off outside the glass doors and secretly dreams of being on (even piloting) one of them. While selling forty-rupee tea isn't getting her any closer to that, Hasina keeps her spirits up by making friends (and enemies) among the other airport staff, ...

A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse.Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of ...

By the two-time winner of the Giller Prize for his novels The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram LallUhuru Street is M.G. Vassanji’s stunning book of linked stories, set within the Asian community of Dar es Salaam. With delicate strokes, and with irony and humour, Vassanji brings alive the characters who live and work in the shops and tenements of Uhuru Street; among them: Roshan Mattress, so called because of her free and easy ways; a str...

When ten Pakistani men walk into Kathleen Jamie's small Scottish town on a peace march, in November 2001, she is thrown back to her own travels in Northern Pakistan and a book she wrote a decade earlier. Among Muslims is the account of Jamie's time travelling alone and living among the Shia and Ismaili Muslims in the Northern Areas - the mountainous regions wedged between Afghanistan, India and China and one of the most volatile borderlands in the world. A bold, sympathetic and superbly wr...

Rehan Tabassum has grown up in a world of privilege in Delhi. His mother and her new husband embody the dazzling emergent India everyone is talking about. His real father, however, is a virtual stranger to him: a Pakistani Muslim who lives across the border and owns a vast telecommunications empire called Qasimic Call.As Rehan contemplates his future, he finds himself becoming unmoored. Leaving the familiarity of home for Pakistan in an attempt to get closer to his father, he is dra...

Recently, South Asian writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monica Ali have been dominating the world’s literary scene, winning prestigious prizes, and appearing on numerous bestseller lists, and being hailed by critics and readers worldwide. Yet never before has their work appeared together in an anthology. Now, for the first time, the internationally heralded writer Shyam Selvadurai has collected the very best of South As...

“A Bangladeshi immigrant in London is torn between the kind, tedious older husband with whom she has an arranged marriage (and children) and the fiery political activist she lusts after” (Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Sisterland) in this Booker Prize–shortlisted work of literary fiction about the immigrant experience.After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi villa...

A Palestinian P.I. investigates the death of a pregnant Saudi teenager in a mystery that offers " a fascinating glimpse into the workings…of Saudi society" ( Publishers Weekly).When sixteen-year-old Nouf ash-Shrawi goes missing, her prominent family calls on desert guide Nayir al-Sharqi to lead a search party. Ten days later, Nouf's body is discovered. The coroner determines that she was several weeks pregnant. But even more unsettling is ...

“This is why we read fiction at all” raves the Washington Post: Family life meets historical romance in this critically acclaimed, “gorgeous, sweeping novel” (Ms Magazine) about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of an award-winning writer who richly deserves her international acclaim.On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, ...