Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Jasoda by Kiran Nagarkar

Jasoda by Kiran Nagarkar. HarperCollins. We meet Jasoda the eponymous hero/heroine/protagonist of Kiran Nagarkar`s novel as she takes a quick break from working the family`s barren field to deliver a child. The moment she sees it’s a girl, she quickly puts it between her thighs and squeezes till the little girl is still. Because Jasoda…

Book review: The Brahmin by Ravi Shankar Etteth

The killing game A fast-paced thoroughly entertaining read that mixes up some history, some espionage and some gory stuff. Ravi Shankar Etteth is back with his fifth book and this one The Brahmin (Westland Books) is a spy thriller. Not your routine spy thriller, though; this story is set in the times of Ashoka ruler…

Book excerpt from Two by Gulzar

And somewhere in Gulzar`s re-visitation of the trauma of Partition, a novella titled Two, is this throwaway line: Before Pakistan took shape on the map, it started taking shape in the minds of the people. This was true of both Hindus and Muslims. The untouchables had been similarly alienated centuries ago. In one masterstroke the…

Book review: Still Me by Jojo Moyes

A romance at its heart For those readers who didn’t know that the film Me Before You was originally a book – it was. It did well, as did the movie version of the story, with the author Jojo Moyes also writing the screenplay. Still Me is the third book in the series that followed….

Book review: Different Class by Joanne Harris

Different Class, Joanne Harris. Doubleday Books This is the third in the author`s psychological thrillers but it is a standalone story, and that`s how I read it. Harris had me at Chocolat, years and years ago and though I`ve not always loved her other books in the same way, they always made for an engrossing…

Book review: Scene 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza

On the people who lurked at the edges of the Hindi film industry. Ali Amjad. Harish Rai. Alimullah Khan. Peter the cook who is actually Ramnath. Writers, directors, cooks-turned-scriptwriters — the cast of this novel is made up of eternal hopefuls who land up in the Bombay of the 1970s to live out…

Book review: Becoming A Mountain by Stephen Alter

Becoming a Mountain Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime By Stephen Alter (Aleph Publications) Mountains, says Alter, have been endowed through history with nobility, wisdom, omniscience, as well as described as fearsome, treacherous, demonic. Of course, all this is but the expression of human sensibilities towards the natural world. The…

Book review: Gut by Giulia Enders

This is more a brief take than a review of the book. Gut by microbiologist Giulia Enders (Speaking Tiger Books) turned out to be not a run of the mill pick but a very informative read. The style is most reader-friendly, almost light and chatty but the gravitas of the contents is unmissable. The presentation…

Book review: A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre

This is more a brief take than a review of the book. If every bit of the buzz about the latest (and last?) le Carre is only about the fact that that he brings George Smiley back, well, it`s setting up the reader for something of a disappointment. Truth to tell, that’s not the only…

Book review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

This is more brief take than review of the book. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Pan Books. The May 1996 Everest disaster where eight people died in a storm that hit the mountain with force, is well documented in print and on celluloid too. Jon Krakauer`s account is very matter- of- fact, shorn of…