book review - Comfortably Numb

Book review: The Swap by Shuma Raha

Love, sex and dhokha ‘Soon to be a major web series,’ a blurb announces on the cover of The Swap by Shuma Raha. Within a couple of chapters into the story, which deals with two couples whose lives get remarkably intertwined, the reader sees that the book would translate very well onto celluloid, offering an…

Book review: The Sixth Finger by Malayatoor Ramakrishnan

You would imagine that the origin story of a nascent godman would make for a compelling read. This, unfortunately, is not entirely the case here. Malayatoor Ramakrishnan`s protagonist Vedaraman is introduced to the reader as an urli thief, when the young man is caught stealing the bronze vessel from a temple of all places. We…

Book review: Panjab by Amandeep Sandhu

I open my New Year account of book reviews with a book I read slowly, attentively, absorbing everything it had to give. Amandeep Sandhu`s PANJAB is many things to many readers. There are those like me, who was once familiar with the pinds and the jind of what Sandhu calls the outlier state (and you…

Book review: The Radiance of a Thousand Suns by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Poignant memories A young Sikh woman in NYC tries to deal with the inheritance of particularly painful memories When the winds of independence blew in 1947, it carried within it a monster gale that wreaked damage on Punjab and its people. Thirty-seven years later, those marauding wind storms visited Punjabis yet again, this time in…

Book review: Is There Still Sex in the City by Candace Bushnell

Chick-lit for older chicks? Here, relationships and ageing are more engaging than either sex or the city. With its standout title, Candace Bushnell`s memoir Is There Still Sex In The City? sets up some major expectations, of beautifully made-up, expensively dressed young women dealing with the trials and tribulations of love, sex and everything in…

Book Review: Raavan by Amish

Insidious villain And now, the origin story for Raavan. Unlike in the lacklustre telling of Ram`s story in Ramachandra, Scion of Ishkvaku, and Sita`s tale which, apart from the big reveal, was a pretty straight affair, Amish gives his Raavan enough of an edgy personality so as to make him an interesting protagonist. Picking up…

Book review: The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin by Manu S Pillai

History in sixty takes An absorbing collation of historical tales from across India Manu S Pillai, our desi Dalrymple, gives us another round of Indian history, this time in a collection of essays touching upon one interesting character after another, some well-known, some not, one or two quite obscure. The book is a compilation of…

Book review: The Strawberry Thief by Joanne Harris

In her latest book, Joanne Harris brings back Lansquenet-sous-Tannes` friendly neighbourhood witch, Vianne Rocher. Vianne`s making and scrying with chocolate again; her elder daughter Anouk has stayed behind in Paris and the younger girl Rosette is now a silent sixteen. She believes that her Maman has made a sinister pact with the wind and let…

Book review: Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

The Bennett bibis of Toronto All the familiar drama with some desi spice. Here comes the latest P & P tweak, in the wake of a multitude of literary and cinematic adaptations of that Jane Austen classic. In Uzma Jalaluddin’s ‘Ayesha at Last,’ the Bennet family`s trials and tribulations are given a culture tweak, and…

Book review: A Secret History of Compassion by Paul Zacharia

Sending up everything and everyone A scathing look at life. The reader`s first reaction on reading A Secret History of Compassion is to muse over the probability that Paul Zacharia wrote up the story, then dipped it into a vat of caustic soda. Everything is grist for his mill, or rather pen, here: writers,…