HarperCollins Books - Comfortably Numb

Book review: The House Next to the Factory by Sonal Kohli

The lives of others It`s a quiet gaze that is turned on the tales in The House Next To The Factory. This book of short stories is author Sonal Kohli’s debut and it`s an assured debut. Set in Delhi, spanning timelines between 1980 and 2010, the stories are inter-linked, with some characters in one story…

Book review: The Forest I Know, a gathering of tanka verses by Kala Ramesh

the forest i know, a gathering of tanka verses by Kala Ramesh. HarperCollins Books. Tanka is a five-line lyrical form of poetry which originated in Japan, and Kala Ramesh peppers the pages of this book…

Book review: Rumours of Spring by Farah Bashir

A life of loss Farah Bashir’s poignant memoir is set in the Kashmir of the nineties. It`s a coming-of-age novel, only, in that particular period, coming of age meant navigating the challenges of living in the lethal shadow of conflict. The memoir examines a combat zone, the survival skills and state of mind that needs…

Book review: The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. HarperCollins Books. As someone who has liked everything Divakaruni has written, in varying degrees though, I found this account of Rani Jindan Kaur, the last queen of Punjab, favourite wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh the Lion of Punjab, mother to the last king of Punjab the hapless…

Book review: Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi

Of mothers and daughters A troubled and troubling look at this primary relationship gone awry. There`s a whole pantheon of literature on the topic of troubled mother-daughter relationships which features works like Nancy Friday`s My Mother, Myself, Christina Crawford`s ` Mommie Dearest, Alice Sebold`s The Almost Moon, Sarah Haywood`s Cactus, Jodi Picoult`s Leaving Time, Maya…

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…

Books: Q & A with Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

`My novel explores how a society riven by a seemingly-unending spiral of violence, needs to open up to the stories of its survivors and fold them into its national and social history.` Manreet Sodhi Someshwar`s The Radiance of a Thousand Suns revisits the atrocities faced by the Sikh community, both at the time of…

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…