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Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: The Glass Bead Curtain by Lakshmi Kannan

Feminine Grace Under Fire October 15, 2016 Written by Sheila Kumar Lakshmi Kannan’s debut novel in English charts the life of two remarkable women, Kalyani, a child bride, and Vishalakshi, a young widow in pre-Independence Madras. Both the women display admirable grace under pressure and at some point, the story becomes a celebration of woman power. Kannan deftly…

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Book review: In the Jungles of the Night, A Novel about Jim Corbett by Stephen Alter

First a sort of disclaimer: I grew up on a steady diet of Corbett’s tales of the man-eaters he had encountered and bested; and later on, I grew to really like Stephen Alter’s accounts of life of men and mountains. So this was a double delight for me: Stephen Alter in the voice of Jim…

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Book review: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Eligible: A Biased Review Eligible  is  American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s re-telling of that much loved classic  Pride and Prejudice. To  take on a work, any work of Jane Austen (even when commissioned to do so, as part of the Austen  Project) is one brave thing to do, and inevitably, for every two people who liked   Eligible, four…

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Book review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma by Ratika Kapur

 Storm in a teacup  Once in a while, along comes a book written at the cusp of imagination and craft. This slim volume that released a few months ago, tells a compellingly ordinary story and tells it in style. The protagonist is a middle-aged housewife running to a little fat, going about her everyday life:…

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Book review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

  How To Tame Your Hawk H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Vintage Books) is an award-winning (the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction, the Costa Book of the Year prize) story of healing with a hawk. It is not a new release but it has long transcended the time barrier. It is the kind of…

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