By Swadesh Deepak. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak

In the stories, Deepak emerges as a master narrator who calibrates movements of his characters to generate necessary suspense. The names of the characters are often revealed only after two-three pages. And often anecdotes and sub-plots thicken the texture of the stories. The settings in the stories are functional, and dynamic in the sense that their details keep recurring in a haunting way.


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar
By Syed Mujtaba Ali. Translated from the original Bangla by Nazes Afroz

The dobhasi (bilingual) love tale of Shabnam, an Afghan girl, and Majnun, a teacher from ‘Bangla-land’, unfolds against the backdrop of the Afghan Civil War of 1928–29, in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. These two lovers bond over their shared passion for poetry. As political upheaval shakes the country with the rise of Bachae-e-Saqao (Habibullah Kalakani) and his Saqqawists challenging Amanullah Khan


Reviewed by: Sanobar Hussaini
By Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Translated from the original Bangla by Prasun Roy Fingerprint

Prasun Roy’s translation keeps alive the uneasiness about the ghosts, whether they are antagonistic or friendly and generous, and their doings. But there are numerous sentences and phrases that sound grating to the ear. Tautological expressions like ‘a face soaked in emotional sympathy’ (p. 54), ‘was infamous for being uncannily notorious’ (p. 102), ‘immoral wickedness of this boy’ (p. 106), and ‘the forest was infamous for these notorious beasts’ (p. 128) could certainly have been altered to sharper and more cryptic, non-repetitive ways of saying them by the editor(s). Other hiccups that disrupted fluent reading included imprecise expressions like


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

The interplay between Anuradha, Vardhman and Nandini is central to this lyrical, melancholic novel and its complex exploration of love and life. Shanghvi’s prose is lush, poetic and enchanting in its use of imagery, painting vivid pictures in a story that resonates with the bittersweet music of life’s most enduring truths. The Last Song of Dusk does not offer any easy resolutions as it meditates on the fleeting nature of beauty and the inevitability of loss, told through the lives of characters who are as flawed as they are compelling.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Kaul
By Suresh Sundaresan

Within this circularity are trapped endless stories of the people Chandrakant comes into contact with, who teach him lessons in both life and music, and also of people he never meets, only hears about. The story moves back and forth in time, from Chote Ustad to Bade Ustad, Jaffar Ali Khan, and from there to his Ustad, Sajjad Hussain, who, in turn, had been a disciple of Ustad Muhammad Jafri, the originator of the Karachi Gharana.


Reviewed by: Rana Nayar
By Sudeep Chakravarti

To most Indians the grisly murder and its aftermath story may appear, given the preponderance of similar stories in contemporary times, as another run of the mill. But this is where Chakravarti intervenes to read an otherwise ‘routine’ crime in a most intellectually insightful and sensitive way. His novel analysis, most importantly, brings in the volatile urban political and spatial-temporal context of 1970s-80s Delhi to understand not only the specific crime committed against the Chopra teenagers but also reflects on, among others,


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee