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Deepa Agarwal’s Traveller’s Ghost is the story of three teenagers—Kriti, Mohit and the journalist Neel Pargat. The story starts in the hilly town of Banari where the families have gone for a holiday.

Festival: the very word conjures up images of good food and new clothes. And yet, whose is the celebration? What does a festival mean to the dispossessed, the marginalized? Bama’s Pongal takes this head on, with the very first sentence, ‘Pongal after Pongal, Madasami would pay his respects to his landlord and do whatever he had to, as tradition demanded.

Twelve-year-old Nimmi Daruwala is not an outdoorsy person. However, Mr Bakshi, the ‘kind and enthusiastic’ Principal of Vidya World School, decides that a Team Building Camp would be the best way to launch the school year for troublesome Grade 7.

Many of the stories in this collection are designed to attract young readers, including the reluctant reader! The humorous story that gives the book its title, ‘The Ghost who Played Tennis’ by Santhini Govindan, opens with the tantalizing statement, ‘Shankar did not believe in ghosts until he met one.’

Boom Boom is the story of Sura, a young boy living with his mother in Velankanni in Nagapattinam. He spends his days selling stickers at the Velankanni Church, playing with his friends, and climbing coconut trees.

Who clicked that pic? If there is a question in the title of the book, then there is bound to be curiosity. Today, when mobile cameras are common in most hands, older readers will be nostalgic seeing the cover, and younger readers full of regret that they did not get to see this two-lens heavy weight camera.