As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

    The stories in this book include time stops at shamli (written in 1956 and published for the first time in 1987); The blue umbrella, which has been a bestseller for the last forty years; Angry river, which was a longer work when it was first written, bus stop, (No Suggestions), night of the leopard, the last tiger and tales of (No Suggestions), his latest novella, which was published in 2013. These stories speak of a world that has long vanished, but it is a world that has lost none of its power to enchant. Whether we are accompanying Sita on her perilous journey down the angry river or bisnu as he gets the better of a dangerous leopard, whether we delight in binya’s joy at owning her blue umbrella or are saddened by the fate of the last tiger, whether we laugh uproariously at the antics of the eccentric guests at the ‘hotel’ in shamli, get involved in the adventures of the boys in Pipalnagar or plunge into the various goings-on in the ‘backwater’ of (No Suggestions), we are always entertained, always charmed. All the stories unwind in an unhurried way, even those that are filled with death-defying thrills and spills and it is this quality that enables us to sink into them and experience to its fullest the magic of the fiction that Ruskin bond has spun out of the hills and small towns of India for over sixty years.

    This is the second time that Mr. Bhyrappa is tackling an epic. Forty years ago, he wrote ‘Parva’, a retelling of the Mahabharata. Parva is in the form of personal reflections of some of the principal characters of the epic.

    When a passionate love affair threatens to leave Lucy in disgrace, she chooses a respectable marriage over a life of shame. With her husband, coffee plantation owner James, she travels to her new home in India, leaving her troubled past behind her.Everything in India is new to Lucy, from the jewel-coloured fabrics to the exotic spices. When her path crosses that of Gowri, a young woman who tends the temple on the plantation’s edge, Lucy is curious to find out more about her, and the events that lead her to live in isolation from her family…Now. With her career in shatters and her heart broken by the man she thought was her future, Kayva flees from bustling Mumbai to her hometown. A crumbling temple has been discovered in a village nearby, along with letters detailing its tragic history – desperate pleas from a young woman called Gowri.As Kavya learns of Gowri and Lucy’s painful story, she begins to understand the terrible sacrifices that were made and the decision the two women took that changed their lives forever. Can the secrets of the past help Kavya to rebuild her life?

    ‘His mother is not his real mother, his beloved is not his wife…; his lovemaking is not really lovemaking; his war is not really war. There is always more than meets the eye. And so, only Krishna, of all the avatars, sports a smile, a mischievous, meaningful smile. There is always more than meets the eye, when Krishna is around.’

    We repair them. They get a new shape. Perhaps a new identity. This applies to love as well. Because you are yours before you are someone else’s. But what happens when we fall or fail in love?After two heartbreaks, Adrika, a fiercely independent career-girl, changes her hashtag on Instagram to #HappyGoLucky and dreams become her priority. Arjun, the workaholic and socially inept, struggles with his weakness for Dimpy Aunty’s daughter Anushka and his hesitation in sharing heartaches and emotional baggage. Into this mess, steps in Dimpy Aunty, an unlikely saviour, with all her quirks and jauntiness, steering them through rough patches in unlikely ways as only she can.Insightful, bold and witty, I Tagged Her in My Heart is based on a true story that will inspire many to look at the sunny side of life when faced with darkness.

    There would be no funeral. He had donated his body to the local medical college. It was part of his script, his fantasy about death. He would show his hospital donation certificate to anyone who came to our house. No rituals for me, he would announce. To his mind there was some justice in being cut up by medical students. He had wanted to be a doctor. There is his corpse, lying on the floor, people constantly milling around, talking about his untimely, unfortunate death, while I stare at everyone in dry-eyed annoyance. He had always been a popular man, much loved, generous to a fault to his neighbours, even if angry towards his own family. I just want him gone from the house. When the van from the morgue comes to pick him up, everyone urges us to touch his feet, to ask for his blessings. It is expected from children of dead parents. Everyone watches us. You first, an old man points to me, my father s first-born. I bend down, my fingers touch his feet. In my mind the words form, loud and distinct I forgive you.

    Will friends and family be able to redeem Ally out of the impending doom in time? Will her infallible love become the key to the destruction of her already fragile world? Will madness prevail over love; true love over revenge?Deceived is a gripping psychological thriller that mazes through the deepest, darkest emotions of human mind through the story of a vulnerable girl who treads in the mist of deception bred from a long unforgiven betrayal.

    Not only does Ron steal her heart but he seems equally besotted in a true blue sense of the word. Tia's friends who had always known about her infatuation are more than thrilled as Ron is absolutely a girl's dream come true – a stunner with a heart of gold. Everything seemed just so perfect and it looked like the universe finally heard her wishes...if not for one person who didn’t want her to be with Ron. And it was none other than the person Tia loved most in the world – Rianna, her sister. The bizzare part of it all was that Rianna was no longer alive! Tia was continuously haunted by dreams of her sister who kept warning her off Ron. Her sister’s case being closed off by the police as suicide was something that had left Tia deeply perturbed even years after her passing away. As Tia follows her instincts and tries to solve the mystery surrounding her sister’s death she comes up with evidence that might just open up a can of worms and shatter her whole family. Will she be able to fulfil her sister’s last wish? Will she make the right choice between love and justice? This story is a journey of corporate ambition, greed, lust and betrayal. A paranormal crime novel that will take you on a roller coaster ride of emotions and family drama while at the same time leave you twitching to unearth the mystery of a death, unresolved.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQBjt...

    In the northwestern corner of British India, the Chhappaniya famine stalks the desert region of Shekhavati. A despairing shopkeeper turns to his young son and says, ‘This land has nothing to offer us but sand dunes and khejra bushes.’ Soon after, twelve-year-old Harilal Tibrewal, recently married to eleven-year-old Parmeshwari, sets off, alone, for the densely populated plains of Bengal in eastern India—travelling on camelback and by bus, train and boat to arrive in Calcutta, two thousand kilometres away…In his new novel, Sujit Saraf takes readers on an epic journey from Shekhavati in Rajasthan to the Calcutta of the early twentieth century, to Bogra in East Bengal, and to a village in Bihar in newly independent India. A sprawling, compulsively readable narrative, it follows the story of Harilal as he sets up Harilal & Sons, a shop selling jute, cotton, spices, rice, cigarettes and soap, that grows into a large enterprise. It is also the sweeping tale of his two wives and ever-burgeoning family of sons, daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren—the two strands of family and business inextricably fused because a Marwari’s life is defined by what he ‘deals in’. The novel ends in 1972, as eighty-five-year-old Hari lies dying in the great mansion that he built but never actually lived in. Surrounded by his vast family he wonders why he is still so attached to them. Why has he not reached the third stage in life, the stage of detachment, that his schoolmaster had said he would?Spanning seven decades of an era that saw great tumult in India and Bangladesh, Harilal & Sons is a wonderfully evocative, powerful and capacious narrative—overflowing with a profusion of characters, events and places—contained within the singular life of one man who ‘dealt in jute and grain’.

    And when they face life’s unexpected tribulations, their love also undergoes trials. Read how Ganesha took myriad forms to please Riddhi, Siddhi and Buddhi, how Ravana shared an unbreakable bond with his true love, Mandodari and how Nala and Damayanti’s relationship was tested till almost nothing remained. Tormented by passion, wracked by betrayal, torn by the agony of separation, love in its many splendored forms is the origin of these incredibly endearing stories of Prem Purana.

    Quest for Paradise is a story about love and struggling to vanquish everything in its way, whether it’s people, social stigmas, or an unprecedented catastrophe.

    There weren't any hardships and the only expectation my folks had from me back then was to study well and get good grades. But, I was pretty distracted as a kid... Actually, I still am... Nothing much has changed... So, instead of studying, I would end up making board games and writing short stories to amuse myself. Until one day when my journal entries were seen by a pair of prying eyes... There was nothing embarrassing but I realised the need to be more cryptic. Poetry became the answer. Being a sensitive kid with anger issues ensured that I had plenty to write about. By the time I got to engineering, I had developed a taste for sarcasm and dry humour. Couple of years later, I found solace in six strings and the love affair resulted in further writing... and now, I have reached a point where I have been writing for more than half my life."Obolus" is a rather refined version of this rather normal millennial's rather abnormal musings about Death and Dreams, Life and Existence, Silence and Confrontation, Vulnerability, and them Gods. Hope you have a nice read!If you wish to get and stay in touch, do write to ObolusTheBook@gmail.com and we can take it from there.

    In The Parrots of Desire, the modern reader, to whom the anthology is dedicated, will find a wealth of Indian erotic writing—beyond the famously unbridled passages of the Kama Sutra and Koka Shastra. There is, for instance, the extract ‘Why does sex exist?’ recreated from the 3,000-year-old Rig Veda; the work of the Tamil Sangam poets, whose contemporary finesse belies their antiquity; Bhakti poets Antal and Mahadeviyakka, who describe women’s fantasies of men (whether human or godly); short stories by Kamala Das that have been out of print for decades; excerpts from the work of contemporary writers like Mridula Garg and Ginu Kamani and much more.Whether it is the trepidation of the first time or the delirium and delicious rapture of subsequent ones, the anguish of being abandoned or the ennui of steadfast fidelity; passion, jealousy, suspicion, bitterness or even regret— every aspect of the experience of erotic love, timeless and universal, is manifest in these pages. What emerges from the dozens of pieces in this volume can be called the ‘core’ of Indian erotica: the notion that the erotic, like the human imagination itself, is powerful, unquenchable, passionate and essential to the best life we should seek to make for ourselves.

    When thirty-four year old Yamini gets involved with a much younger dynamic student leader Vikram, she finds an absorbing purpose in her life, but she inadvertently stakes the life of her adoring grandmother in the process. Their fate is curiously entwined with the turbulent Mandal Agitation, and both Yamini and Chulha are in the danger of losing the men they cherish. The title expresses the anguish of central characters, who believe they are cursed by their past and doubt whether they would ever atone for their own transgressions or the sins committed by their ancestors.