Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Barua’s very first novel is an intricate pattern of cultures and politics, refugees and resisters and locates South Asian politics in a wider context. A political analyst and commentator,

The wiki entry on Fatima Bhutto says, ‘she grew up effectively stateless’. In her debut novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon,

It seems that it is difficult to write a south Asian novel, especially one written by an expatriate without asking the extraneous questions about exile and memory, politics and individual life histories, some implications of sexual and ideological preferences and the meaning of it all.

A Fort of Nine Towers is the vivid recollection of a young Afghan author, Qais Akbar Omar, from the last years of the Russians in Afghanistan to the tumultuous years of factional fighting and the eventual dark and suffocating rule of the Taliban.

In My Mother’s House is certainly not yet another book on the civil war in Sri Lanka. The book stands out on three key grounds.

When Orhan Pamuk and Mohammed Hanif, among many others, figure on the blurb of a book singing paeans to it,

My first experience of Bombay was that of cognitive dissonance. This was partly due to the fact that my imagination of Bombay as a city was shaped, in substantial measure, by the newly emerging body of English literature based on the city and partly because the first place I was acquainted with, back in 2006,

In 2008, Nalin Mehta1 wrote about satellite television being not only a marker of the progress of the idea of India, but also being a fundamental contributor to it.