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Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Mother India by Prayaag Akbar

In the name of the mother Prayaag Akbar`s second book contains as much thought-provoking matter as his first,  Leila, did. Using a crisp, matter-of-fact style, Akbar draws a succinct portrait of Indian society caught in the glare of social media headlights. If life was a struggle to stay afloat for much of the earlier generations,…

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Sheila Kumar • August 18, 2024

Book review: This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

Rooted in reality Vauhini  Vara’s debut, ‘The Immortal King Rao,’ a Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was, simply put, an amazing book. As a work  of speculative fiction, it had an imagined world of impressive proportions. In this, her second book, a collection of short stories firmly rooted in reality,  Vara  changes…

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Sheila Kumar • February 4, 2024

The Living Mountain by Amitav Ghosh

THE LIVING MOUNTAIN, A Fable for Our Times, by Amitav Ghosh. Fourth Estate Books.   This is Ghosh, back at what he does so  effectively:  holding up a mirror to our acts of ecological destruction, telling us there`s still time to get our act together, to stop our marauding ways, to clean up after ourselves….

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Sheila Kumar • May 25, 2022

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…

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Sheila Kumar • November 11, 2020