books - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

My Wednesday Book Look is this little gem of a book, SUGARBREAD, by Balli Kaur Jaswal, a 2016 release, HarperCollins Books. Set in Singapore of the early 1990s, the narrator is a ten- year- old girl Pin, Parveen Kaur. In sharp, clear tones, Pin tells us the story of her life, her easygoing lottery-addicted father,…

Book review: Soft Animal by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Love in the time of lockdown Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan spins a most readable tale of how a woman in her late thirties, married to Mukund, who seems to be quite a nice guy, jobless and facing an endless number of lockdown days back when Covid-19 raged, is forced to take a close, grim look at…

Book review: Digesting India by Zac O`Yeah

When food and literature mix….. Travel-writer Zac O`Yeah has travelled the length and breadth of India, stopping for double breakfasts, a handful of lunches, many a bottle of stuff that ranges from grog to branded liquor at many a pub or what passes for a pub in the hinterlands, as well as several dinners, all…

Column: On the Sanitisation of Well-loved Books

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater I recently watched Roger Waters, former Pink Floyd songwriter and bassist, the man who wrote the most scathing lyrics that shone a spotlight on war, violence, twisted men and women, twisted politics, defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism. After I intently searched Waters` monologue for any signs of…

Book review: The Woman Who Climbed Trees

The Woman Who Climbed Trees In this sprawling multi-generational saga of a family based in Nepal, it is Meena the child-bride who is clearly the protagonist. Smriti Ravindra deftly combines the personal with the political in her debut novel; the main concern of this book, however, is women, and the love, loss and pain they…

Book review: Spare by Prince Harry

The Spare strikes back So here are the facts as we know it: The book flew off the shelves in the prince`s home country, as fast as that other Harry`s broomstick on the Quidditch field, selling 1. 4 million copies on its launch day itself. That it`s one big whinge-fest from a seriously troubled not-so-young…

Book review: Where My Feet Fall by Duncan Minshull

Paeans to the pleasures of walking This collection of walking stories quite lives up to the book`s irresistible title. All twenty contributors, including some names familiar to readers in the sub-continent like Pico Iyer, Kamila Shamsie and Keshava Guha, write crisp pieces on where their feet fall by routine/with deliberation/some getting over a reluctance to…

Book review: Chrysalis by Neetha Raman

CHRYSALIS by Neetha Raman (Ukiyoto Press) is the sweet coming- of- age story of an LA-based trust fund heiress, a TamBrahm girl who is compelled by circumstances to return to Chennai for a year, take over her grandfather`s media empire, come to terms with the sense of loss she still feels about her parents` death,…

Book review: Chronicles of the Lost Daughters by Debarati Mukhopadyay

Women who wield the narach Simply put, translations of regional literature is a gift that keeps on giving. Arunava Sinha’s translation of Narach, the best-selling Bengali novel, is one such addition to the pantheon. The English title of Debarati Mukhopadhyay’s book is Chronicle of the Lost Daughters, and is a story about women and everything…

Book review: Girl A by Abigail Dean

Many years after the trauma…. Every so often a book is declared a publishing sensation. Sometimes it is a debut novel, sometimes it is a thriller and very often, it has `girl` in its title. Like Gone girl and The Girl on the Train. The book then sells for huge sums after multi-way auctions, film…