My Country My Life


L.K. Advani - 2008
    K. Advani, an Indian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004, and was the Leader of the Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha. The book was released on 19 March 2008 by Abdul Kalam, the eleventh President of India. The book has 1,040 pages and narrates autobiographical accounts and events in the life of Advani. It became the best seller book in the non-fiction category and Advani joined Archer as a bestseller author. The book website claims the book sold an excess of 1,000,000 copies. The book alongside mentions the event in Indian politics and India's history from 1900 till date.

Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi


Nathuram Godse - 1993
    Book contains the original statement given by Nathuram Godse (Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi).Writer is real brother of Nathuram Godse himself and narrates his accounts of all the events and takes us through the day of assassination till the day Nathuram Godse was hanged.Writer also puts forward crucial accounts of public and political opinions and reactions which were stirred up by assassination itself and also by Nathuram Godse's official statement to court.

Baluta


Daya Pawar - 1978
    Reader will then seek to be more humane henceforth in life, What else is the intent of all good literature? Creating new kinship among mankind and free the society from artificial and vexing bonds, right? The same can be said for all Pawar’s literature."

My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir


Jagmohan - 1993
    The present Sixth edition updates the book to February 18, 2002. It deals not only with the Pokhran Nuclear Test and Kargil war and the events leading to the Vajpayee-Musharraf Summit but also with the ever-increasing dimensions of international terrorism which resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center and attack on the Indian Parliament.

The Tiger Claw


Shauna Singh Baldwin - 2004
    A former Dutch spy told her of the brave and beautiful Indo-American woman who left her family in London, England to become a spy in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.The story immediately intrigued Baldwin, inspiring her to travel to Europe, seek out the places where Noor lived, interview the people who knew her and discover more about the enigmatic woman. The Giller Prize finalist The Tiger Claw — Baldwin’s follow-up novel to her award-winning What The Body Remembers — was born from the silences, conflicting stories and significant gaps she discovered along the way.As the novel begins, we’re thrown into a bleak German prison cell with Noor, where she is shackled hand and foot and freezing from the winter’s cold. It is December 1943, the turning point in the war raging in Europe. Noor’s captor, Herr Vogel, allows her onionskin paper on which he directs her to write children’s stories. She does so, but also secretly writes letters to someone she addresses as “ma petite,” the spirit of the child she had conceived with Armand Rivkin, a French Jewish musician and the love of her life. Although she must keep the letters hidden from her captor, it is through these words to her unborn child, alternating with a thrilling third-person narrative, that we learn Noor’s courageous and heartbreaking story.Noor’s mother is an American from Boston who married a Sufi musician and teacher from India. Growing up in France, Noor is extremely close with her liberal Muslim father, but when he dies, Noor’s conservative uncle Tajuddin and her brother Kabir govern the family.Uncle Tajuddin and Kabir disapprove of Noor’s love for Armand, and as the men of the family in 1930s France, they have the legal right to stop her engagement. Noor is faced then with the choice between defying her family and turning against her heart. She stops seeing Armand, but is devastated and lonely. Once the war begins, Noor’s family heads to England while Armand’s family stays. When Germany invades France, Noor despairs of ever seeing Armand again, until Kabir unwittingly introduces her to his new friend who is recruiting bilingual women for the resistance. Noor is offered training, and she accepts. She will help defeat the Germans, but her true purpose will be to find and reunite with Armand.As a resistance agent, Noor trains to be a radio operator, taking on a second identity — Nora Baker — one of many names she will eventually assume. When she arrives in France, she plays Anne-Marie Régnier — a woman caring for her sick aunt — and to other spies in her resistance network, she is known as “Madeleine.” She has secret rendezvous with other agents, transmits messages from various safe houses, and risks capture at every turn. She rents an apartment across the street from Drancy, the concentration camp where she knows Armand is being held. At great peril, she sends him a message — the tiger claw pendant she always wears for luck and courage. Noor must wade her way through oppression and hypocrisy from all sides: h her beloved Armand could be killed by the Germans at any time; her French and British colleagues fight the occupation of France while Britain still occupies India; she learns of dark family secrets; and, one by one, members of the spy network are being ratted out by a double agent. Betrayal can come from anyone. We know from the beginning that Noor will end up imprisoned, but who betrays her? Will she ever be released? Will Kabir find her? Will she and Armand be reunited? Baldwin paces the story like a nail-biting thriller, revealing only a little bit at a time. The Tiger Claw is packed with complex characters riding the line between good and evil. In the end, it is the reader who must be the judge, and decide where he or she stands.

प्रकाशवाटा [Prakashvata]


Prakash Amte - 2009
    Prakash and Dr. Manda Aamte's life in Hemalkasa, district Gadhchiroli in Maharashtra depicting the journey from initiating the "Lokbiradari Prakalp" till date. Their endeavor was to bring "Madiya Gond" Tribes from this area to the forefront. These tribals were not exposed to the modern life, they had no opportunities to prove themselves in the world, they had no means of educaton or subsistence. Under Baba Aamte's guidance, blessings he, his wife, Dr. Manda, his brother, Dr. Vikas performed this work and this is a story of how this dream turned into reality at a place called Hemalkasa.

अस्वस्थ दशकाची डायरी


अविनाश धर्माधिकारी - 1990
    The same has been narrated in the book.

The Space Between Us


Thrity Umrigar - 2006
    Set in modern-day India, it is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years.

The Brave: Param Vir Chakra Stories


Rachna Bisht Rawat - 2014
    Rachna Bisht Rawat takes us to the heart of war, chronicling the tales of twenty-one of India s bravest soldiers. Talking to parents, siblings, children and comrades-in-arms to paint the most vivid character-portraits of these men and their conduct in battle, and getting unprecedented access to the Indian Army, Rawat has written the ultimate book on the Param Vir Chakra.

Difficult Daughters


Manju Kapur - 1998
    Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor--a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.

Curfewed Night


Basharat Peer - 2009
    The issue of Kashmir still is a crucial issue discussed across forums in the global arena and is one of the major hindrances in improving relationship with India’s neighbour and kin of one time. Much has been written about Kashmir and the separatist movement in Kashmir. But the beautifully scripted account of the brutality with which the separatist movement is carried on till date has no precedence. The book, Curfewed Nights, gives an honest, crude, and truthful account of what goes on in the paradise of India which is under the spell of the separatist movement.The author of the book, Basharat Peer, being a Kashmiri himself has related to each and every detail provided in the book from the first hand experiences gathered by him. Since independence of India, many Kashmiri youths have been mesmerised by the terrorism to the extent that they want to join the terrorist organisations even without thinking about their families or themselves. They have illusioned godfathers in the leaders of such terrorist outfits. In fact, the author was sent out of Kashmir by his family, just to keep him away from these painful romances with the militants.The book, Curfewed Night, has a lot of heart-rending accounts of how a mother watches her son who is forced to hold an exploding bomb or how a poet discovers his religion when his entire family is killed or how the politicians are tortured inside the refurbished torture chambers or how villages have been rigged with landmines which kills innocent civilians, and how temples have converted into army bunkers while ancient Sufi shrines have been decapitated in bomb blasts.

Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT


Chetan Bhagat - 2004
    In fact, it describes how screwed up things can get if you don’t think straight.”Three hostelmates – Alok, Hari and Ryan get off to a bad start in IIT – they screw up the first class quiz. And while they try to make amends, things only get worse. It takes them a while to realize: If you try and screw with the IIT system, it comes back to double screw you. Before they know it, they are at the lowest echelons of IIT society. They have a five-point-something GPA out of ten, ranking near the end of their class. This GPA is a tattoo that will remain with them, and come in the way of anything else that matters – their friendship, their future, their love life. While the world expects IITians to conquer the world, these guys are struggling to survive.Will they make it? Do under performers have a right to live? Can they show that they are not just a five-point-somebody but a five-point-someone?

Makers of Modern India


Ramachandra Guha - 2010
    The existence of such a complex and distinctive democratic regime qualifies as one of the world's bona fide political miracles. Furthermore, India's leading political thinkers have often served as its most influential political actors--think of Gandhi, whose collected works run to more than ninety volumes, or Ambedkar, or Nehru, who recorded their most eloquent theoretical reflections at the same time as they strove to set the delicate machinery of Indian democracy on a coherent and just path. Out of the speeches and writings of these thinker-activists, Ramachandra Guha has built the first major anthology of Indian social and political thought. Makers of Modern India collects the work of nineteen of India's foremost generators of political sentiment, from those whose names command instant global recognition to pioneering subaltern and feminist thinkers whose works have until now remained obscure and inaccessible.

The Lowland


Jhumpa Lahiri - 2013
    In the suburban streets of Calcutta where they wandered before dusk and in the hyacinth-strewn ponds where they played for hours on end, Udayan was always in his older brother's sight. So close in age, they were inseparable in childhood and yet, as the years pass - as U.S tanks roll into Vietnam and riots sweep across India - their brotherly bond can do nothing to forestall the tragedy that will upend their lives. Udayan - charismatic and impulsive - finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him: his newly married, pregnant wife, his brother and their parents. For all of them, the repercussions of his actions will reverberate across continents and seep through the generations that follow. Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portrayal of lives undone and forged anew, The Lowland is a deeply felt novel of family ties that entangle and fray in ways unforeseen and unrevealed, of ties that ineluctably define who we are. With all the hallmarks of Jhumpa Lahiri's achingly poignant, exquisitely empathetic story-telling, this is her most devastating work of fiction to date.

Devdas


Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - 1917
    When Devdas returns to his village, now a handsome lad of nineteen, Paro asks him to marry her. But Devdas is unable to stand up to parental opposition to the match and rejects the proposition. Stunned, Paro agrees to marry an elderly widower. Devdas returns to Calcutta, but every waking hour of his is now filled with thoughts of Paro and his unfulfilled love for her. Desperate to resolve the situation somehow, he runs to Paro who is now married and asks her to elope with him, but she refuses.Heartbroken, he seeks solace in alcohol and in the company of the courtesan Chandramukhi. Chandramukhi falls in love with Devdas, but even when he is with her he can only think of Paro. It is now his destiny to hurtle on relentlessly on the path to self-destruction. Devdas’s tortured life ends when, dying of a liver ailment brought on by alcoholism, he journeys to Paro’s house to see her one last time. Arriving in the middle of the night, he dies unknown, untended, on her doorstep. Paro comes to know of his death only the following morning. Devdas has enthralled readers and filmgoing audiences alike for the better part of a century. This new translation brings the classic tale of star-crossed lovers alive for a new generation of readers.