2019
‘For most, school begins with crayons, satchels and tears. But for Ananya, it began with smiles and a lipstick.’
This delightful children’s novel recounting a young girl’s adventures in a private boarding school opens by describing the delight of its protagonist Ananya Patel.
2019
Here is a complete package of real life conflict, love and hope attractively coloured by gloom of darkness to sparkle of Light. The unusual title—Darkless–invokes curiosity because there is no such word in the dictionary, still it manages to convey a whole depth of meaning as the story completes.
‘Long, long ago there was a kingdom called the Golden Valley, nestling amidst evergreen forests.’ Manoj Das’s book opens in the manner the best fairy tales do–by evoking an idyllic sylvan world where ‘everyone lives happily’. However, he says, even in Golden Valley,..
2020
‘History tells us what people do. Historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.’ Jean M Auel
Queen of Earth is a gender bending narrative of a spunky queen, appropriate to our times.
Kalinga of the seventh century is a vast land ruled by two adversaries, the Somavamsha and the Bhaumakaras.
The fate of a young princess caught in their crossfire is expertly depicted by Devika Rangachari in Queen of Earth.
Sisters at New Dawn by Varsha Seshan is a coming-of-age story of two sisters, Padma and Kannagi Shankar. Most of the action of the story takes place at New Dawn, a high school that is committed to fostering values of ‘honesty, integrity, justice’ in the students enrolled there.
A cardboard box appears on the beach, a wet wriggling cardboard box. What does it contain?
Woof! Adventures by the Sea narrates the life of Mumbai’s homeless dogs on the beach. A new puppy is discovered and helped by the pack of resident dogs and large-hearted humans, given a name and a sense of belonging.
Some of South Asian literature’s most lauded works belong to the fascinating category of Sci-fi/Dystopian Fiction. It already existed even before its so-called definitions came to the forefront. Resurgence and increasing acclaim of western sci-fi fiction.
Bengali Renaissance had contributed significantly to the literary works and the cultural resurgence in India between the nineteenth and twentieth century. Even before the movements like ‘Prakalpana’ and the Little Magazine Movement gained momentum in twentieth-century Bengal.
Shefali Jha and Rekharaj. Illustrations by Chinan and K.P. Rezi. Translated from the original English into Hindi by Swayam Prakash
Itihaas ki Atmayein is a collection of two stories from English into Hindi, namely, Badshah, Mera Dost (My Friend, The Emperor) by Shefali Jha and Pyaari Atmayein (Beloved Spirits), by Rekharaj. The former narrates the story of a young boy Adil who is disinterested in the subject history.
2020
What is a solitary, hastily drawn line capable of? Could this line impact millions of lives, and, ultimately, generations to come?
Nayanika Mahtani’s Across The Line dwells on such a topic, and is inarguably my best fortuitous read in a long time. A tour-de-force in its own right.
Joseph Srinivas wakes up one day to find that things aren’t quite right. He hasn’t jumped through a closet door, nor got a special letter—he just happens to find himself in a strange new place. He is greeted by Mishi, a fellow transitioner who guides him through Gravepyres.
Perumal Murugan is one of the foremost of Tamil writers today. Poonachi: Lost in the Forest is apparently extracted from a novel, Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat, which I haven’t read, was short-listed for the JCB Prize for Literature. I have no doubt that it.
2019
As The Book Review went into press for its children’s issue in November last year, Nabaneeta Dev Sen lay dying, and breathed her last on November 7, 2019 after a prolonged battle with cancer. It was too late to include an obituary, but a children’s writer as.
2019
If you are the kind of person who always finds herself in hot water without a clue as to how it happened, this is the book for you.
The story of Kabir, the Flyaway Boy, delves deeply into the heart of a child who cannot squeeze himself into the conventional mould. It explores the situation of an imaginative youngster who simply cannot live up.
Ruskin Bond is a gift that never stops giving. In his latest offering, a memoir titled A Song of India: The Year I Went Away, Bond shares snippets of his life at age sixteen. Sixteen is an age of irrepressible excitement in anyone’s life. We are not quite children and not quite adult.
Enid Blyton is easily one of the most popular authors in English for children. Most known for her series such as The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Malory Towers, The Faraway Tree, her books have enlivened the childhood of many. Though she wrote in the early- and mid-1900s.
My Daddy and the Well paints a restful landscape filled with the simple pleasures of childhood—a world that any reader can recognize and delight in. With his lips stained pink with the juice of kokum fruit, the child protagonist takes us through his various adventures while visiting…
Which is the tallest tree in the world? Which is the biggest garden in the world? Were peaches called Persian apples? These are just a few of the questions that can be answered by this book. From herbs and spices to forests, from gardens in deserts to gardens on cliffs.
Testimonies are powerful because they bring together immediacy of experiences, urgency of issues and force of convictions into the moment of enunciation. This tract seeks to mobilize that power to address one of the most pressing issues of our time, climate change.