Summer in Greece


Patricia Wilson - 2021
    Every year she escapes for a few weeks to beautiful Greek islands, losing herself in photography and wreck diving.When the junk room of her clifftop cottage is cleared to accommodate a carer for her father, Summer stumbles across the belongings of her great-grandmother, Gertie Smith. She finds a WWI nurse's uniform, a soldier's blanket, and a recording of Gertie's memoirs. As Summer listens to it, she learns about her great-grandmother's secret life, and might just find the strength to let go of her own tragic past.1916When eighteen-year-old nurse Gertie Smith signs up for the war effort, she is thrilled to learn that her destination will be Greece. With a head full of blue skies and handsome men, she boards the Titanic's sister ship, the hospital ship Britannic. Unprepared for the horrors of war, she heads for the Greek island of Lemnos on a mission to rescue three thousand wounded British soldiers.The Britannic never reaches its destination. Gertie, who disobeyed her orders, blames herself.She is sent to the Greek island of Kea, where she meets and falls in love with a Greek fisherman, Manno - but she finds herself torn between him and her duty to an English soldier, and all too soon her past catches up with her.

The Magic Of Malgudi


R.K. Narayan - 2000
    Narayan has few rivals when it comes to bringing alive people and places. Most of his timeless novels are set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located somewhere in South India, a town as real to his readers as any they will find on the map. This volume contains three quintessential Malgudi novels — Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The Vendor of Sweets. Swami and Friends, published in 1935, was the first novel Narayan wrote. Described by Graham Greene as a novel in ten thousand, it recounts the adventures of ten-year-old Swaminathan and his friends Rajam and Mani. The Bachelor of Arts, the second novel in the collection, is a brilliantly realized account of the workings of a young man’s mind. It is the story of Chandran, in his final year at college, who falls hopelessly in love and is forced to exile himself from the familiar surroundings of Malgudi until he is able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution to his problems. The Vendor of Sweets showcases a classic cross-generational battle, between Jagan, a widower of firm Ghandian principles, and his ‘modern’ son Mali, who returns to Malgudi with a half-American wife and a grand plan for selling story-writing machines.The third in the series of Penguin India’s collectors’ editions of the Malgudi novels, The Magic of Malgudi, with an introduction by S. Krishnan, will delight first-time readers as well as devoted Narayan fans.

The Naked Triangle: An Autobiographical Novel


Balwant Gargi
    

रावीपार


गुलज़ार - 1999
    The stories in this book have their roots in the Indian culture but express universal emotions that are experienced across the boundaries of regions, caste, and creed. Varied emotions of love, heartbreak, aloofness, anxiety, fear, and longing are expressed in this book.There is one story in which movie star Dilip Kumar breaks the heart of a young girl. There is another where a man pushes off another from a moving train. Raavi Paar also tells the story of a Muslim man whose wish is to be cremated after death and not be buried. There is also a story about a married woman who realises that the only reason for her husband to marry her was to use her as cheap labour.The title of this book is an incident from the author’s own life. During the India-Pakistan partition, the author was mistakenly claimed as their own child by another family. Raavi Paar consists of stories which will touch the reader’s hearts due to the simplicity and intricacy of emotions portrayed by the author.

Khushwant Singh On Women, Love & Lust


Khushwant Singh - 2002
    Whether he is analysing the fine dividing line between obscenity, pornography and erotica, his description of sex from 'Chaturbhani' (200-350 B.C.) or describing his ideas of a composite Indian woman. The book abounds with Indian as well as foreign myths, legends, proverbs and poems ranging from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman to Kalidasa, Iqbal and Faiz.

Confessions of a Failed Anorexic


Michelle Cantrell - 2011
    Longing for what she doesn’t have, the unfulfilled stay-at-home mom goes on a journey of self discovery tainted by the pursuit of a perfect body. An unlikely friendship with fun-loving and thin-obsessed Stacy Vargus leads Sarah down a path she believes will bring her closer to a world she has spent a lifetime chasing, only to realize it doesn’t exist. An unexpected reunion with an old friend unleashes a passion for life Sarah had long forgotten, giving her a new lens through which to view her world.This debut novel by Michelle Cantrell offers an entertaining twist on keeping up with the Joneses while revealing the dangers of losing oneself to the superficial status symbols of suburban life.

Chimera


Vivek Ahuja - 2012
    A violent uprising has been instigated all across Tibet as Beijing moves to establish control while the Dalai Lama’s health deteriorates further and questions on the future of the Tibetan leadership are raised. As Beijing pursues the rebels and their benefactors within India, both nations are plunged into a spiraling descent to war. Now each side must navigate their widely different paths to victory as vast armies on both sides wage all-out war in their bid to become the dominant power in Asia… Book Edition: II

Operation 'Fox-Hunt'


Siddhartha Thorat - 2014
    The Pakistani army, mauled by the Abbottabad raid, decides to create andexecute an operation that will get the Pakistani public opinion firmly behindthem. Major Shezad Khan, a much decorated officer from the Pakistani army’selite Special Service Group (SSG) embarks on a mission to attack a strategictarget in India. His comrades-in-arms are five ferocious Lashakar-e-Taiba militants.Though he crosses into India through Kashmir, there is one man who has beentasked with the job of ensuring that they don't reach their target. RAW’s SeniorField Agent Sanjay Khanna teams up with Military Intelligence and NSG tothwart the attack.The narrative sweeps across the vast expanses of Tajikistan, the malarial jungles ofBengal, through conflict zones in Baluchistan, and the Vale of Kashmir as the twomen and their teams race against time. A thrilling finale awaits in the maximum city – Mumbai.Will the ‘Fox-Hunt’ succeed?

Poovan Banana and the Other Stories


Vaikom Muhammad Basheer - 1994
    He has enshrined in them every kind of experience from the pangs of hunger and sex to the rapture of mystic vision. Its range includes stark realistic pictures of the material world as well as the realm of fantasy haunted by ghosts and spirits. Basheer has written on love and hate, on politicians and pickpockets, on the fancies of childhood and on the disillusionments of adult life with an intense sense of the tragedy of life and at the same time an irrepressible sense of humour.

The Lady in the Veil


Leah Fleming - 2015
    It must have been sitting on the garage shelf for years among all the other family rejects.'When a woman finds a lost photo album in a garage clearout, she is drawn to the images of her ancestors. But one image in particular stands out: a baby sitting in the lap of its mother, both draped from head to toe in a cotton lace curtain or something, completely enveloped and unrecognizable. Who are they and what has happened to them?In a story that moves between 2012 and 1850, the shocking secrets of one family are gradually revealed …

Love Unexpected


Ritu Kakar - 2020
    

A Tiger At Twilight And Cyclones


Manoj Das - 1991
    . . [will] take a place on my shelves beside the stories of Narayan — Graham GreeneThis volume presents two celebrated novels by Manoj Das, one of India’s most illustrious authors, who has been writing in English and Oriya (Odia)for over six decades.In A Tiger at Twilight the erstwhile raja of Samargarh returns to his abandoned palace in Nijanpur, after years of self-exile, with his sick daughter and his supposed half-sister, and immediately assumes the responsibility of killing a man-eating tiger. Assisting him are a few noted men of the valley including Dev the owner and manager of a resort. But as the hunt intensifies Dev realizes that things aren’t as they seem: Heera, the raja’s sister, has an inexplicable power over the men in the hunting party and a strange connection with the tiger. As the men get closer to killing the beast, bizarre things begin to happen, hinting at the influence of the supernatural.Cyclones is set in Kusumpur, a small coastal village, during the struggle for Independence. The village is devastated by a cyclone and Sandip, the scion of the zamindar (land-lord) family, helps restore it. The war-time colonial government, though, wants to turn the sleepy hamlet into a busy port town. They plan to fill up the river that flows by it, in the process angering all the villagers, including Sandip. But when the contractor for the project is found murdered, Sandip is accused of the crime, forcing him to flee from the authorities. This is the start of a series of adventures that take him from a remote ashram in a forest to the city where communal violence is rife. Cyclones is a powerful novel about the metaphorical storms that gripped the nation during the most turbulent period of its modern history.

Vikram Betal. The 24 Riddles and the Origin of the Betal: All stories of Vikram and Betal from the Tamil Original Vikramaadityan Kadaigal


Sooriyakumar Sivakumaran - 2017
    Based on the Tamil Original Vikramaadityan Kadaigal. All the 24 riddles/stories that the Betal narrated to King Vikramaadityan. Also included is the story of the origin of the Betal - Who is the Betal? How did he/she become a Betal? What is its redemption?

Scar Tissue


David Skivington - 2013
    Transported to a dingy basement in Kolkata to identify the body of her murdered husband she has no explanation for his presence in India. As she searches for answers about who the man she married really was she finds his death surrounded by allegations of drug smuggling, child trafficking and murder. Unsure of what is true and who she can trust, Rachel has no idea of the danger her husband's hidden life has put her in.

Wedding Album


Girish Karnad - 2008
    The central characters of this play portray the modern, middle-class, Indian family: a daughter who lives inAustralia with her husband and children, a son who is a media professional, a younger daughter who is willing to marry a 'suitable' boy from the US whom she has never met, a doting mother, an ageing father rapidly losing his authority, and a loyal cook. Wedding Album operates at two levels: it explores the traditional Indian wedding in a globalized, technologically-advanced India even as it juxtaposes the very different life experiences and expectations of the family and the loyal cook. By doing this, Karnad reveals how particular notions ofwealth, well-being, sexual propriety, tradition, and modernity form the basis of middle-class society in contemporary India. This play has already been staged at numerous venues and was translated by Karnad himself from Kannada into English. An outstanding addition to OUP's corpus of plays by Girish Karnad, this volume will be of value not only to students and teachers of modern Indian drama, but also to general readers.