Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move […]
Chowringhee, first published in Bengali in 1962, is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of the inhabitants of the suites, restaurants, bars and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant, he tells […]
Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold – the warring housewives on the first floor, the lovesick teenagers on the second, and the widower, alone and quietly grieving at the top of the building. In a fevered state […]
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers […]
On a dark evening in November 1862, a cheap coffin is buried in eerie silence. There are no lamentations or panegyrics, for the British Commissioner in charge has insisted, ‘No vesting will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Mughals rests.’ This Mughal is Bahadur Shah Zafar II, one of the most tolerant […]
Love and Longing in Bombay confirms Vikram Chandra as one of today’s most exciting young writers. In five haunting tales he paints a remarkable picture of Bombay – its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries – while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit. About Vikram Chandra Born in New Delhi, India, in 1961, […]
‘A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world,’ writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. ‘Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.’ For Kundera, that curtain represents […]
Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Balram was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, […]
Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth explores the heart of family life and the immigrant experience. Eight luminous stories – longer and richer than any Jhumpa Lahiri has yet written – take us from America to Europe, India and Thailand as they follow new lives forged in […]
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi’s first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain. Karim lives with his mum and dad in a suburb of South London and dreams of making his escape […]