Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

‘There is a river. In front of it is a house that opens to a limitless horizon’ (p. 5). The novel begins with the description of this ‘limitless’ river on the banks of which is situated the ancestral house of Raghunath Kalama. Both the river and the house have interesting roles to play in the re-exploration of the Kalama family history as well as the Buddha legend.

With this rendering of Bani Basu’s novel Kharap Chhele, published in 2001, Nandini Guha earned Katha Award for translation. A novel that claims to shatter myths, ‘Dark Afternoons’ is about a shocking discovery a woman chances upon as she struggles to make her afternoons meaningful.

Recognized as the first original memoir in Hindi, Apni Khabar spans half a century of its authors engagement with the contemporary socio- polity from the vantage point of the problematic of his ‘writings.’

The epigraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne sets the tone of this new short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri; for human nature to flourish, it must have other birthplaces and strike roots in ‘Unaccustomed Earth’. Lahiri’s collection of short stories falls into two parts.

There’s a certain kind of writer who should be allowed to grow old only if he promises to do it disgracefully. Many of Hanif Kureishi’s fans would argue that he belongs to this group,

M. Mukundan is one of those fiction-writers in India, who, writing in his mother-tongue Malayalam set out to liberate contemporary fiction from the tyranny of the social, the outward, the eventful and to connect it with the existential, the inward, the less audible rhythms of living.

Ameen Merchant’s debut novel gently tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, stirring one’s compassion for the two sisters torn apart by varying compulsions that engulf their life in a middle class agraharam (Brahmins’ colony) in a provincial town in Tamil Nadu.

This volume comprises essays that Meenakshi Mukherjee, one of the most respected literary critics of our time, wrote for special occasions, some of them lectures delivered at different places.

Prest Futures presents a thought-provoking ethnography of village life in Rawain (western Garhwal), a region that originated, and was affected and influenced by the Chipko movement.

It is unusual for a book which is itself a ‘Review’ to be reviewed by a person with an evident bias in the subject. It is better therefore that the bias is brought up front before readers draw their own conclusions. The reviewer was connected with the formulation of the first notification in 1994 under the Environment Protection Act.

The author of this book is a highly respected figure, who, as the blurb tells us, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia and in the field of international development. Given the vast knowledge and wide-ranging experience that have gone into the making of the book,

Let me start this review with a confession: I loved this book. The challenge of writing this review is to write without gushing.

Sri Lanka in the Modern Age sets out to be a different kind of Sri Lankan history; one in which a broad brush-strokes, largely top-down, linear narrative is transformed into an amazing account of human experiences of change—from shoes and sarongs to ways of learning to turf-battles in the corridors of power.