This is a delightful collection of twenty-five crisp and intriguing short stories that will enliven and charm your leisure hours. The writer employs the 'Today-technology' of story telling: An economy of words; a simplicity of style; and a tempo and cadence that match the brisk life-style of today.All the stories have an Indian aroma and diaspora

The story is set in a sparsely populated tract of the heavily forested foothills of the Himalayas: an area that lies roughly between India and Nepal and in places is virtually untouched. The 'Forest People' of this area have minimal contact with the outside world and dwell entirely in the forest living off its produce .These are the 'Wild Honey Gatherers' – a race almost extinct – they have strange ways and are rumored to possess the ability to communicate with birds and beasts. When encou...

Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my...Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to op...

A muscular, deeply incisive and deathly funny comment on twenty-first century India, The Story of My Assassins is a multi-layered novel that skilfully slashes through the subcontinent's dubious spiritual serenity to lay bare every crippling divide of language, wealth and class. Trawling life and death in the dark underside, it inquires into the inexorable codes of power and wealth that propel societies. A triumph of disparate voices, unbearable realities, and impossible conundrums, this is...

Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction"The excellent strength [the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them." – San Francisco ChronicleSet in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to ...

Where innocence, deceit and love collideAnand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well-married, rich. At least, that's how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find.Kamala, Anand's family's maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anand's wife: a w...

When Bindra contracts leprosy, she is driven from her home in the Himalayan foothills with her two small sons and embarks upon a seemingly impossible course in search of salvation. David's first journey to India is driven by devastating loss, and yet he finds unexepected solace in the discovery of an exceptional family legacy, and insights offered by an unorthodox mountain tradition. As these individual journeys progress their stories are woven together, cultural differences are dissolved,...

From the floodlit TV studios of Mumbai to the glittering Rajput courts, Vikram, Amanjit, Deepika and Ras must battle the sorcerer-king Ravindra: his power is growing, and so is his evil reach . . .The second in award-winning author David Hair's series The Return of Ravana.Mumbai, 2010: Everyone's talking about Swayamvara Live!, the TV reality show recreating the ages-old custom where young men compete for the hand of a nobl...

Daksha lives in a hamlet in the Himalayas. An orphan, she learns native medicine by assisting a vaidya. A chance encounter brings her to the notice of people who move her to town and admit her to a school.Daksha is unhappy there and wants to return to her hamlet – until a resourceful doctor helps her adjust to her new life.Daksha the Medicine Girl and The Missing Girl (also by the author) are used as supplementary readers in some schools in India.

In fifteen stories that are at once grim, wryly ironic, humorous and affecting, acclaimed Rajasthani writer Ratan Kumar Sambhria portrays with rare acuity the injustices rampant in a caste-driven society and the triggers that spark rebellion.Poverty and greed degrade blood ties; money plays a dramatic role in changing equations between oppressor and oppressed; livestock and land become precious beyond measure. Yet, love – between men and women, mother and child, a ...

The Indian short story is extraordinary in its ability to stick to the traditional rules of the craft and still demonstrate remarkable originality. It revolves around a limited number of characters, confines itself in time and space, and has a well-plotted narrative that drives its central theme. Within the traditional framework, however, creativity flowers and a fresh and imaginative story emerges. This volume is chock-full with such stories, written by authors well known in their regiona...

A magical, inventive novel about one man's struggle to find his place in the small Indian village of his birthIn Anita Nair's warm and imaginative first novel, middle-aged Acuthan Nair returns home to restore his childhood house and to confront old ghosts. When he begins the project, he hires the town painter, One-Screw-Loose Bhasi, to oversee the renovation, and the two men quickly develop a close friendship. Bhasi, who has a special talent for healing the wounded, helps Acuthan co...