Book picks similar to
Ships That Pass by Shashi Deshpande


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Last Man in Tower


Aravind Adiga - 2011
    Tower A is a relic from a co-operative housing society established in the 1950s. When a property developer offers to buy out the residents for eye-watering sums, the principled yet arrogant teacher is the only one to refuse the offer, determined not to surrender his sentimental attachment to his home and his right to live in it, in the name of greed. His neighbours gradually relinquish any similar qualms they might have and, in a typically blunt satirical premise take matters into their own hands, determined to seize their slice of the new Mumbai as it transforms from stinky slum to silvery skyscrapers at dizzying, almost gravity-defying speed.

Rain


Sriram Subramanian - 2016
    When fortune deserts Jai and his carefully ordered life spins inexorably out of control, Jai stands on the brink of ruin. Only a delayed monsoon can save Jai’s biggest project from disaster, but there are millions across the land praying for the exact opposite. Reason seems to have its limits - the weather defies all prediction, let alone control. Will Jai relinquish the beliefs of a lifetime? Will he reconcile with the awful ambiguity about his past? Will he be able to save his crumbling marriage?

Hey Dad! Meet My Mom...


Sandeep Sharma - 2015
    What happens when a 10 year old child, who claims to be your future son, comes to you to help you find a perfect match for his mother? What happens when eventually you start to doubt on his intentions? What happens when a girl starts to turn your dreams into nightmares? What happens when your ‘Future son’ starts to haunt you? What happens when your FUTURE starts to bleed in your PRESENT through your PAST? ‘Hey Dad! Meet My Mom!!!’ is nothing less than a roller coaster ride of comedy, fear, love and don't forget to expect the unexpected!

Train to Pakistan


Khushwant Singh - 1956
    By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra.”It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the “ghost train” arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endured and transcends the ravages of war.Introduction by Arthur Lall

Drop Dead: A Niki Marwah Mystery


Swati Kaushal - 2012
    And, with all due respect, sir, who the hell are you?'When a body mysteriously appears at the bottom of the otherwise serene hills of Sonargam in peak tourist season, Superintendent of Police, Shimla, Niki Marwah, and her crack team of investigators must act quickly to find out how Rak Mehta, the hotshot President & CEO of a super-successful publishing company, landed there.As they scour the grounds of the luxurious Lotus Resort, where Indigo's employees have checked in for their annual conference, the police team uncovers bitter rivalries, secret grudges and vicious lies – not to mention the victim's own sordid past that has made him more enemies than friends.Lipstick stains, condoms, a notebook full of rambling code; bribery, mind games, broken promises - everything points to murder. And, with the list of suspects growing, it will take all of Niki’s ingenuity and skill to catch the killer before Sonargam's idyllic landscape is disrupted once again...

Untouchable


Scott O'Connor - 2011
    A year has passed since Lucy Darby's unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley--an 11-year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid--hasn't spoken since his mother's death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.As the impending arrival of Y2K casts a shadow of uncertainty around them, their own precarious reality begins to implode. Questions pertaining to the events of Lucy's death begin to haunt David, while The Kid, who still believes his mother is alive, enlists the help of his small group of misfit friends to bring her back. As David continues to lose his grip on reality and The Kid's sense of urgency grows, they begin to uncover truths that will force them to confront their deepest fears about each other and the wounded family they are trying desperately to save.

Mrs Funnybones


Twinkle Khanna - 2015
    and I am wide awake because the man of the house has decided that he needs to perform a series of complex manoeuvres that involve him balancing on his left elbow. When I fell asleep last night, there was a baby lying next to me. Her smelly diaper is still wedged on my head but aside from this rather damp clue, I can't seem to find her anywhere. I could ask my mother-in-law if she has seen the baby, but she may just tell me that I need to fast on alternate Mondays, and God will deliver the baby back to me . . . Full of wit and delicious observations, Mrs Funnybones captures the life of the modern Indian woman—a woman who organizes dinner each evening, even as she goes to work all day, who runs her own life but has to listen to her Mummyji, who worries about her weight and the state of the country. Based on Twinkle Khanna’s super-hit column, Mrs Funnybones marks the debut of one of our funniest, most original voices.

Bhendi Bazaar


Vish Dhamija - 2014
    Three teenage girls planning a flight from the Soviet Union to the West end up being sold in Mumbai's red-light area instead. The murders start a quarter of a century later. The victims are all men. All of them tricks, waiting for trysts with high-class escorts. DCP Rita Ferreira is quick to recognize the serial-killer strain; the media isn't far behind. The news sends shockwaves through the city. The first serial killer in living memory of Mumbai is out on the streets. As Rita grapples to establish the killer's pattern through Bhendi Bazaar, the killer gives her 24 hours to stop the next murder. Can she do that before she becomes the next victim?

A Place For Us


Harriet Evans - 2014
    She can’t live a lie any more.The invitation goes out far and wide, calling her three children and their families back home to Winterfold, their rambling house in the heart of the English countryside. They are Bill, the doctor; Florence, the eccentric academic; and Daisy, the child who never fit in. As the story unfolds, each character reveals the secrets, joys, and tragedies they are wrestling with through the confines of the family. What will happen when Martha finally tells the truth?

Ladies Coupé


Anita Nair - 2001
    In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to feel complete?This wonderfully atmospheric, deliciously warm novel takes the reader into the heart of women's lives in contemporary India, revealing how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with hunsbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same world over.

The Secret Scripture


Sebastian Barry - 2008
    Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Swami and Friends


R.K. Narayan - 1935
    Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian."—Graham GreeneOffering rare insight into the complexities of Indian middle-class society, R. K. Narayan traces life in the fictional town of Malgudi. The Dark Room is a searching look at a difficult marriage and a woman who eventually rebels against the demands of being a good and obedient wife. In Mr. Sampath, a newspaper man tries to keep his paper afloat in the face of social and economic changes sweeping India. Narayan writes of youth and young adulthood in the semiautobiographical Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. Although the ordinary tensions of maturing are heightened by the particular circumstances of pre-partition India, Narayan provides a universal vision of childhood, early love and grief."The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness—like one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."—Margaret Parton, New York Herald Tribune"The novels of R.K. Narayan are the best I have read in any language for a long time. . . . His work gives the conviction that it is possible to capture in English, a language not born of India, the distinctive characteristics of Indian family life."—Amit Roy, Daily Telegraph

Narcopolis


Jeet Thayil - 2012
    In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

Em and The Big Hoom


Jerry Pinto - 2012
    Between Em, the mother, driven frequently to hospital after her failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, the father, trying to hold things together as best he could, they tried to be a family.

Dreams in Prussian Blue


Paritosh Uttam - 2010
    So when he proposes that they drop out of college and live-in, she readily agrees. But life with Michael soon turns into an emotional rollercoaster. Temperamental, opinionated and incredibly selfish, he expects Naina to run the household so that he is free to paint. Naina tries her hand at several odd jobs, but when an accident leaves Michael blind, their life together begins to come undone as she can only helplessly watch. And in trying to pull it together, Naina is driven to being what she has never been—a liar and a cheat. Will Michael forgive her when he learns the truth? Will she forgive him for what he has done to her?