HarperCollins Books - Comfortably Numb

Book review: Kashmir by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Hellfire in a heavenly valley With Kashmir, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar ends her moving Partition Trilogy. The first book Lahore dealt with the conflagration that flared up in the northwestern part of a then unified India at the time of Partition, and the many innocents that conflagration consumed, even as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Lord…

Book review: The Fast and the Dead by Anuja Chauhan

Murders in the ooru Anuja Chauhan brings her deceptively mild-mannered sleuth ACP Bhavani Singh back with her second murder mystery, The Fast and the Dead. The book has everything fans of her work like and look for: enough red herrings, a whole slew of interesting people with enough motivation to make the cut as suspects,…

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: Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang

The perils of purloining This book quite lives up to the buzz it generated at release. It`s a brief, acute meditation on the agony and the ecstasy of writers, the insecurity that goes with the act of turning author, the imperatives of the publishing industry. All of this shelters under a zinger of a story:…

Book review: The Last Courtesan by Manish Gaekwad

This woman`s life It cannot be the easiest of things, to write your mother`s memoir. All the more when your mother happened to be India`s last tawaif or courtesan. Manish Gaekwad, though, has turned a steady gaze on his mother`s colourful life and written up the account with unflinching honesty. Ultimately, what comes through is…

Book review: The Retreat by Zara Raheem

Healing after heartbreak Zara Raheem`s The Retreat is a nice light read. The style is a chatty one, the topic takes up the difficulty in sustaining, managing a marriage of some years, in this case ten, the location is the West Coast of America, and the protagonist, a Muslim working professional woman. Nadia Abbasi is…

Book review: Not Quite a Disaster After All

Belonging and unbelonging Buku Sarkar`s intriguingly titled book Not Quite a Disaster After All traces the life path of a Bengali girl named Anjali from her childhood spent in a Kolkata manor to the NYC neighbourhood which eventually becomes home to her, some years later. The trail switches from an upper crust lifestyle to a…

Book review: Way of the Witch by Ipsita Roy Chakraverti

The Wiccan way Everything you wanted to know about witchcraft, says the tagline, and India`s First Wiccan delivers on that promise. Long credited for bringing the practice of Wicca out of the fog of ignorance, superstition and calumny, Ipsita lays it all out in this book, as clear as the crystals Wiccan use in their…

Book review: Hyderabad by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

When push came to shove In the second book of her Partition trilogy, author Manreet Sodhi Someshwar trains focus on the state that lay in India`s belly and was giving then Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel a severe stomach-ache. The facts as they were, are known to all history buffs. Hyderabad was ruled (nominally, as…

Book review: More Spooky Stories by Tanushree and Ajoy Podder

The ghosts are back in this follow up to Tanushree Podder`s YA fiction, ‘Spooky Stories.’ In this sequel of sorts, which is also a crossover work into adult readership, the mise-en-scene is a classic one. Uday Sengupta travels from the US to India to visit his uncle, Keshav Roy, after many years. The taxi driver…