book review - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Blood Brothers by Chandini Santosh

Blood Brothers, A Story of Separation and Loss by Chandini Santosh. Dhauli Books. Chandini Santosh takes up the twin strands of a little village by a river and of the communal politics ravaging it, entwines the two, and offers up a compelling story that warms the cockles of your heart even as it fills you…

Book review: Girls and the City by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Revenge of the city A romance, some sleaze and a deluge impact the lives of three girls in Bangalore. Manreet Sodhi Someshwar puts her character development skills up front in this story of how three women, from Unnao/ Mumbai/Chandigarh, try to hack a living in Bangalore. By the time the racy, pacy tale winds down…

Book review: Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane

Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane. Granta Books/2003 release. A history of a fascination, the tagline reads and indeed, the redoubtable Macfarlane demystifies much of the intrinsic, intense, often fatal, fascination that mountains hold for human beings. The most poignant part of this wonderful book for me, was Macfarlane`s recounting of the legend of…

Book review: The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins Books. 2017 release. So, this is a story you read at one sitting, with something small and hard lodged at the back of your throat, and be warned, that something never dissolves; not while you are reading the book, not for a while after…

Book review: It`s All In Your Head, M by Manjiri Indurkar

Managing the Black Dog A brave account of struggling with a troubled mind and body. If life sometimes looks to be all uphill, never is this more manifest than in Manjiri Indurkar`s It`s All In Your Head, M. Laid low with a bevy of stomach- related ailments, some of the trouble diagnosed to a rotavirus…

Book review: Rhododendrons in the Mist by Ruskin Bond

There`s a tale called Panther`s Moon in Ruskin Bond`s book RHODODENDRONS IN THE MIST (Aleph Books/2019 release) a collection of the writer`s favourite tales of the Himalaya. And Panther`s Moon is a classic example of why Bond`s popularity amongst the reading public continues to thrive, to flourish, to attract newer readers. The story puts little…

Book review: Kintsugi by Anukrti Upadhyay

The gleam of a repaired heart Kintsugi is a collection of six short stories, all the characters linked to each other, some tenuously, some strongly. We meet Haruko, a jewellery apprentice of Japanese-Korean extraction in a jeweller`s lane in Jaipur, after which we go over to Tokyo, then Kyoto, to meet Meena, Yuri and Hajime….

Book review: Akbar the Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty

This is more a brief take than review. Akbar the Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty. Aleph Books. Such a good read. The picture of the protagonist that emerges from Ira Mukhoty`s book on Akbar is an illuminating one: a man of modest build, sharp intelligence, quick temper, a fondness for taming elephants (he knew the…

Book review: A Burning by Megha Majumdar

This is more a brief take than review. A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Penguin Hamish Hamilton Books. A story soaked in sorrow, it tells of a young girl from the slums and more importantly, from `the` minority community, who, late one night, gives in to a moment of indiscretion via a Facebook comment, in the…

Book review: Hunted by the Sky by Tanaz Bhathena

Enter the Star Warrior A prophecy. A child with a scar. A villain slated to be killed by said child. Tanaz Bhathena’s Haunted by the sky, a YA fantasy fiction, shares these plot points with Rowling’s Potter series. There are other similarities too, but then the template of good versus evil, or even of a…