News

The Stranger And Other Curious Stories is a collection of short stories by AWIC for young children. The 14 stories all deal with very unusual unexplainable happenings which children will find very interesting, captivating and will certainly tickle their imagination. The stories deal with a wide range of episodes—meeting interesting strangers on a hillside during a holiday, acquiring a secret friend while in hospital, befriending a ferocious dog who otherwise hated strangers—all dealing with differing nature of experiences and happenings, but all very gripping. The stories, besides being interesting, are descriptive and informative.

Rumer and Jon Godden were prolific writers, especially the former. The sisters spent their childhood and then a few years of their adult lives in India, even remaining in the country after Independence. Indian Dust Stories, a collection of short stories, a Ruskin Bond collection, features two poems and thirteen short stories. The two poems are by Rumer Godden, while three of the short stories are by Jon Godden and the rest by Rumer Godden. The poems talk about the harsh reality of life even if it is in the midst of what may seem as great beauty to the eye—the river in Bengal and the winter in Kashmir.

Asking somebody who picked up the first Harry Potter book when he was 11—the age Harry himself was when his world was turned upside down with the revelation that he was a wizard—to review the final instalment of JK Rowling’s hugely successful series is quite a gamble. As I type this, it is only my consideration for you, dear reader, that is holding me back from GOING ALL CAPS and screaming my praise for Harry Potter And The Cursed Child to the high heavens. But that would be me as a fan. Let me try it as just a reader. Cursed Child is different from all the previous Harry Potter books for several reasons. The most obvious, of course, is the format. This is not a book. It is the script for a play. The fact is obvious from the get go, with the book starting with italicized stage directions.

Sulajhti Kadiyaan is a collection of four novellas in Hindi. All the novels are for young teenagers and deal with the protagonists solving a mystery in each story. It reminds me of the Hardy Boys series in English, though these are not about the same boys, as the authors are different and the locales in which the stories are set are also different. What is worth mentioning about these four books is that, in each story history has been woven in deftly, so that the reader gets a flavour of the local history, without it reading like a boring history lesson. There is just the right mix of information and imagination in each novel to hold the readers’ interest.

A breath of fresh air in the stale world of Indian detective fiction, this book is the third of the Reema Ray Mystery series, the first two being The Masala Murder and Dead in a Mumbai Minute. Titanium is a top security agency of India, founded by young Shayak Gupta. Reema Ray is one of its employees. She is tall, young, attractive, and also in love with Shayak who has earlier turned her down. The love angle is an essential part of the narrative, making Reema take all sorts of risks in tracking down a conspirator defaming Titanium and its founder. Reema shaves off her head and, with colleague Terrence, goes undercover to the ashram of guru George Santos.

The fascination with Sherlock Holmes has endured across time and generations. Fans cannot have enough of this great fictional detective and his associate, John Watson. More recently, their adventures have been adapted and recreated for television and cinema, sometimes with a very modern upgrade. Every spin-off has worked remarkably well, a testimony to the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original creation. So it is that Holmes has been dragged into even more adventures, four of which have been penned by the authors of The Sherlock Holmes Connection, created specially for the reading pleasure of teens. The adventures in this book are set in two countries, India and Sweden, and span a period of over a century. Martin Widmark’s story is set in Stockholm towards the end of the First World War.