Especially in your thirties. Having been pressured by her tight-knit community to get married at a young age to her first serious boyfriend, Anu Desai is now on her own again and feels like she is starting from the beginning. But Anu doesn’t have time to start over. Telling her parents that she was separating from her husband was the hardest thing she’s ever done—and she’s still dealing with the fallout. She has her young daughter to support and when she invests all of her savings into running her own yoga studio, the feelings of irresponsibility send Anu reeling. She’ll be forced to look inside herself to learn what she truly wants.

    When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. An elite group calling itself the Lashkar-e-Talatashar has scattered around the globe, the fate of its members curiously resembling that of Christ and his Apostles. Their agenda is Armageddon. In the labyrinthine recesses of the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears she will eliminate all who do not believe in her twisted credo. In Tibet, Buddhist monks search for a reincarnation while in strife-torn Kashmir, a tomb called Rozabal holds the key to an ancient riddle. Father Vincent Sinclair, has disturbing visions of himself and of people familiar to him, except that they seem located in other ages. He goes to India to piece together the violent images burnt onto his mind. Shadowing his every move is a clandestine society, which would rather wipe out creation than allow an ancient secret to be disclosed.

    That urban legend had always existed. Now, though, someone was conspiring to make it come true. In the case of the famed marble monument, all was not on the surface. A vast labyrinth ran underneath closed to visitors where Mehrunisa was trapped once. In a series of suspenseful twists and turns, the action traverses from the serene splendour of Taj Mahal to the virulent warrens of Taj Ganj, from intrigue-laden corridors of Delhi to snowy Himalayan hideouts.... As a right-wing Hindu party ratchets up its communal agenda and Islamic militants plot a terror attack, in the dark corners of his devious mind a behrupiya, a shapeshifter, is conniving to divide the nation in two. To save the Taj Mahal, Mehrunisa must overcome a prejudiced police and battle her inner demons as she sifts the multiple strands that lead to the conspirator.

    Will you still call this a love marriage? And what if on the engagement day while you pull the ring out from your pocket, you realize what you planned was just a dream which never comes true…? How would you react when a beautiful person comes into your life, becomes your most precious possession and then one day goes away from you…forever? Not all love stories are meant to have a perfect ending. Some stay incomplete. Yet they are beautiful in their own way. Ravin’s love story is one such innocent and beautiful story. He believes love stories seldom die. They are meant to stay for the generations yet to come and read them. And given that one chance to narrate his love story, this is how he began…

    The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.”Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.

    Urquhart’s selection includes stories by major literary figures such as Mavis Gallant, Carol Shields, Alistair MacLeod, and Margaret Atwood, and wonderful stories by younger writers, including Dennis Bock, Joseph Boyden, and Madeleine Thien. This collection is uniquely organized into five parts: the immigrant experience, urban life, family drama, fantasy and metaphor, and celebrating the past.

    Shame for liking men. Shame for wanting to be a songwriter. Shame for not being like his perfect brother. Shame for his alcoholism. And most of all, shame for what happened with the first boy he ever loved. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash must return to Illinois to confront his demons and the painful memory of a sexual awakening that became a nightmare. Akash's mum, Renu, is also plagued by guilt. She had it all: doting husband, beautiful house, healthy sons. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband's death approaches Renu can't stop wondering if she chose the wrong life thirty-five years ago and should have stayed in London with her first love. Together, Renu and Akash pack up the house, retreating further into the secrets that stand between them. When their pasts catch up to them, Renu and Akash must decide between the lives they left behind and the ones they've since created. By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of '90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.

    These willingly allowed themselves to be bedevilled, consumed by a passion that would not be denied, existing only to serve her will, content to be moulded to suit the purposes of the most enchanting creature in all of creation – Mohini.Distilled from the essence of Vishnu, Mohini, the Enchantress is a part of him and yet she revels in the autonomy and extraordinary powers of beauty, magic and enchantment that are hers to wield. Vivid and ephemeral, she is beloved and desired by all in existence. But she is elusive as the fragment of a forgotten dream, a tantalizing temptress, traipsing her way across the topsy – turvy realms of fable and myth. Her meandering path will see her in the thick of things as the Devas and Asuras churn the ocean of milk to get their hands on the nectar of immortality, blunder into a love triangle that will spark a bloody war, fulfil the last wish of a dead hero, melt into the arms of Mahadeva, the only one capable of enchanting the enchantress and become the mother of Shastha, who will serve as a beacon of hope for all who are considered oddities by a spiteful society that recognizes only two genders amongst the vast multitudes... Set against the tumult and intrigue of a celestial quest for immortality, Anuja Chandramouli brings the extraordinary saga of Mohini to vivid life. Balancing delicately on the tightrope between mythology and reality, she takes the reader on a dizzying ride through the shifting sands of time, gender, love, and desire, deftly intertwining the threads of the past and the present, blurring the lines between fact and fiction while spinning a deliciously entertaining yarn for the ages.

    Keita can only be safe if he keeps moving and eludes Hamm and the officials who would deport him to his own country, where he will face almost certain death.This is the new underground. A place where tens of thousands of people deemed to be “illegal” live below the radar of the police and government officials.As Keita surfaces from time to time to earn cash prizes by running local road races, he has to assess whether the people he meets are friends or enemies: John Falconer, a gifted student intent on making a documentary about AfricTown; Ivernia Beech, an elderly woman who is at risk of being forced into an assisted living facility; Rocco Stanton, a recreational marathoner who is the Immigration Minister; Lula DiStefano, self-declared Queen of AfricTown and Madame of the community’s infamous brothel; and Viola Hill, one of the only black reporters in the country, who is investigating the possibility of corruption linking the highest officials in Freedom State and Zantoroland.Keita’s very existence in Freedom State is illegal. As he trains in secret, eluding capture, the stakes keep getting higher. Soon, he is running not only for his life, but his sister’s life, too.Fast-moving and compelling, The Illegal addresses the fate of an undocumented refugee who struggles to survive in a nation that does not want him.

    In The Ascetic of Desire, called a literary achievement of the highest order, by The Times (India), acclaimed author Sudhir Kakar tells the story of the man who is believed to be the author of the Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana, and the time in which he lived-the fourth century A.D., considered the golden age of Indian history. In The Ascetic of Desire, the elusive sage Vatsyayana recounts his youth to a young pupil. The young man, planning to write Vatsyayana's biography, listens dutifully as Vatsyayana shares stories of a childhood spent largely in the brothel where his favorite aunt worked. As Vatsyayana's story unfolds, the pupil finds, to his consternation, that his own life has begun to reflect and parallel the ascetic's narrative. At the point where their stories intersect, the unexpected happens. Like Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, Sudhir Kakar's novel is a startling combination of psychological insight and historical detail. With rights sold in eleven countries, this is a story of universal appeal imbued with a distant world's charm and exotic allure. The best novel on sex and sensuality I have ever read. (Khushwant Singh, author of Train to Pakistan)

    In her most passionate novel yet, she brings us the riveting story of two sisters, and a love that illuminates life.You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking. But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.

    It is a dark world, shot through with flashes of joy and lunacy."I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet, just like a human being..." Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, his back twisted beyond repair by the catastrophic events of "that night" when a burning fog of poison smoke from the local factory blazed out over the town of Khaufpur, and the Apocalypse visited his slums. Now just turned seventeen and well schooled in street work, he lives by his wits, spending his days jamisponding (spying) on town officials and looking after the elderly nun who raised him, Ma Franci. His nights are spent fantasizing about Nisha, the girlfriend of the local resistance leader, and wondering what it must be like to get laid. When Elli Barber, a young American doctor, arrives in Khaufpur to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk -- only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the Kampani -- Animal gets caught up in a web of intrigues, scams, and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage. Profane, piercingly honest, and scathingly funny, Animal's People illuminates a dark world shot through with flashes of joy and lunacy. A stunning tale of an unforgettable character, it is an unflinching look at what it means to be human: the wounds that never heal and a spirit that will not be quenched.

    On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

    Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past.

    Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?