Benyamin. Translated from the original Malayalam by Swarup B.R.
2020
Benyamin’s latest novel in English, Body and Blood, unravels a new kind of politics that interweaves faith and crime as the author deals with the influence of religious dogmatism in the lives of faithful believers. The setting of the novel spreads over a group of Indian cities and the narrative is shaped.
Amit Dasgupta
Lockdown. Isolation. Social distancing. Cases. PPE. These are but fragments of the vocabulary that have entered our lives with the onset of the pandemic. Now that ‘the new normal’ has been set and the countless deaths slowly become cold numbers that we scroll past on .
Kaori Takahashi
Each an eight page fold out hard-board book, this set of four books, Peek-a-Book by Kaori Takahashi has been very well conceptualized and designed. One of the books deals with a friend’s birthday and is called Birthday Surprise. As you unfold the sturdy hard-board colourfully illustrated pages.
Lakshmi Iyer
Given that the picture on the book cover of Why is My Hair Curly? is of a curly-haired girl in reverie holding a pen with a journal in her hand, coupled with the title, one might anticipate the book to be about a young girl’s travails of managing curly hair. One would be wrong.
Khyrunnisa A. Illustrations by Meenakshi Iyer
Filled with word plays, a bit of silliness and a lot of fun, The Crocodile Who Ate Butter Chicken for Breakfast and Other Stories is a collection of short stories which centres around animals, and the people around them.
Jerry Pinto. Illustrations by Kripa. Hindi translation by Sandhya Gandhi Vakil
The Art Gallery on Princess Street is a historical biography of the world famous art Gallery of Modern art–Bombay’s Gallery Chemould. Earlier art was confined to traditional depiction of people, buildings and animals. The most famous genre of art was Mughal paintings or miniature painting.
Rick Riordan
Ten years ago, the famous children’s author Rick Riordan, of Percy Jackson fame, published The Lost Hero, the first book in his The Heroes of Olympus series. It was an instant hit. It caused a whole lot of young readers like me to fall in love with Greek and Roman mythology.
Anu-Chowdhury-Sorabjee. Illustrations by Kalyan Joshi. Translated from the original English by Madhu B. Joshi
The original story titled A Camel for Kelam (Guest Editor Shabnam Minwala) and its Hindi translation, as the Hindi title makes it clear, Kelam ko Chahiye Oont, is about an animal-lover, Pabuji who lives in Rajasthan, and his niece Kelam who also loved animals. But her heart is set on a camel.
Sheela Preuitt and Prabha Ram. Illustrations by Ashok Rajagopalan
Can you taste with your toes? Or see with your ears? Or, at least, smell with your hair? No? Well, there are creatures around you that can!
Take a peek into an intriguing world to discover the different ways in which animals do things that are ‘normal’. And look out for the funny bits in the pictures!.
Nizrana Farook
The Girl Who Stole an Elephant is an extremely imaginative and captivating read. It has healthy doses of adventure, bravery, friendship, wilderness all thrown in. What attracted me to the book first was that the protagonist was a girl about my age.
Mamta Naini. Illustrations by Sandhya Prabhat
2019
A Saree for Ammi is a short, heartwarming story set in Kota, Rajasthan. It is a story of the humble existence of a weaver’s family and narrates how his two young daughters put their mother’s happiness over their own. It teaches the reader a little about making of a saree–from dyeing the threads to weaving.
Anonymous. Illustrations by Niharika Shenoy
Shaljam is an instance of a predictive tale as it constructs itself on a repetitive anticipated pattern. It is a Russian folk tale, often translated as ‘The Giant Turnip’, collected by Alexander Afanasyev. Such folk tales are also called cumulative tales or chain tales since they form a string of recurring verses.
Story and illustrations by Indu Harikumar. Translated into Hindi by Dipali Shukla. Design by Kanak Shashi. Edited by Bharat Tripathi
Cut Piece Kumar, a bilingual e-book in English and Hindi by Indu Harikumar, is meant for pre-teenagers who generally love to try their hands at creative arts. The book is about a young boy Kumar who can turn junk into beautiful and useful things.
Mohammad Sajid Khan. Illustrations by Saurabh Pandey
This is a story about the journey of a sprig from a neem tree. Separated from its tree and transported away by the wind, it recalls all that had been and fears what will become of it.
Vinita Krishna. Illustrations by Shashi Shetye. Translated into Hindi by Vinatha Viswanathan
Pichki is happy to push her way out of the ground into the fresh air only to find that as she grows into a neem tree she is rejected again and again, as smelly, bitten by flies, mosquitoes, caterpillars and even birds. Hurt, she however finds redemption when her healing powers.
Chatura Rao. Illustrations: Proiti Roy
Only Fools Go To School by Chatura Rao is based on a beautiful story that deals with the adventures of a little boy named Sambha, who is initially very reluctant to go to school. He feels that the school is for fools and hence spends most of his time outside.