A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire.History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. Satisfied—and a little bored—by his success as a kingmaker, through the simple summoning of his gifted mind, he recedes into the shadows to write his Arthashastra, the ‘science of wealth’. But history, which exults in repeating itself, revives Chanakya two and a half millennia later, in the avatar of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in smalltown India who becomes puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals—including a certain slumchild who grows up into a beautiful and powerful woman.Modern India happens to be just as riven as ancient Bharat by class hatred, corruption and divisive politics and this landscape is Gangasagar’s feasting ground. Can this wily pandit—who preys on greed, venality and sexual deviance—bring about another miracle of a united India? Will Chanakya’s chant work again? Ashwin Sanghi, the bestselling author of The Rozabal Line, brings you yet another historical spinechiller.

    The professional meeting explodes into an intense, passionate relationship. Prague in winter is a beautiful and moody setting to the feverish love affair. The complicated and inevitably short-lived romance is poignant and deeply moving in its telling by the master of the modern Hindi novel, Nirmal Verma.This book is translation of original novel in Hindi, called Ve Din.

    Prominent among its many characters are Rabindranath Tagore or Robi, the young, dreamy poet, torn between his art and the love for his beautiful, ethereal sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, and the handsome, dynamic Naren Datta, later to become Swami Vivekananda, who abandons his Brahmo Samaj leanings and surrenders himself completely to his Guru, Sri Ramakrishna. The story also touches upon the lives of the men and women rising to the call of nationalism; the doctors and scientists determined to pull their land out of the morass of superstition and blind beliefs, and the growing theatre movement of Bengal, with its brilliant actors and actresses who leave behind the squalor of their lives every night to deliver lines breathtaking in their beauty. Through all this runs the story of Bharat and Bhumisuta - one an illegitimate prince, the other a slave who rises to become the finest actress of her age - who cling to their self-respect and love in a society which has little time for people like them. Grand in its scale and crackling with the energy of its prose, First Light is a rich and comprehensive portrait of Bengal, from its sleepy, slow-changing villages to the bustling city of Calcutta where the genteel and the grotesque live together. Equally, it is a chronicle of a whole nation waking up to a new, modern sensibility.

    As a religious novel about a decaying brahmin colony in the south Indian village ofKarnataka, Samskara serves as an allegory rich in realistic detail, a contemporary reworking of ancient Hindu themes and myths, and a serious, poetic study of a religious man living in a community of priests gone to seed. A death which stands as the central event in the plot brings in its wake aplague, many more deaths, live questions with only dead answers, moral chaos, and the rebirth of one man. The volume provides a useful glossary of Hindu myths, customs, Indian names, flora, and other terms. Notes and an afterword enhance the self-contained, faithful, and yet readabletranslation.

    Arranged Marriage, her first collection of stories, spent five weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list and garnered critical acclaim that would have been extraordinary for even a more established author.For the young girls and women brought to life in these stories, the possibility of change, of starting anew, is both as terrifying and filled with promise as the ocean that separates them from their homes in India. From the story of a young bride whose fairy-tale vision of California is shattered when her husband is murdered and she must face the future on her own, to a proud middle-aged divorced woman determined to succeed in San Francisco, Divakaruni's award-winning poetry fuses here with prose for the first time to create eleven devastating portraits of women on the verge of an unforgettable transformation.

    This novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

    All signs being auspicious, the villagers triumphantly assured Sampath's proud parents that their son was destined for greatness. Twenty years of failure later, that unfortunately does not appear to be the case. A sullen government worker, Sampath is inspired only when in search of a quiet place to take his nap. "But the world is round," his grandmother says. "Wait and see Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking a longer route." No one believes her until, one day, Sampath climbs into a guava tree and becomes unintentionally famous as a holy man, setting off a series of events that spin increasingly out of control. A delightfully sweet comic novel that ends in a raucous bang, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is as surprising and entertaining as it is beautifully wrought.

    Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, he yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the Tulsi family, on whom he becomes dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in a struggle to weaken their hold over him.

    On one level the theme is a clash between the old and the new, between traditional medicine and the Western system of allopathy. The traditional system of Ayurveda, Iiterally the Veda concerning life, is based on the Hindu concept of rebirth and the dignity of death, with the belief that death is only a part of the continuous process of renewal which goes on in life. But no modern doctor would be willing to accept death as a means of the graceful exit. He would consider it morally wrong to let a patient meet his end without a fight.But it is not just a clash of values that the novel is concerned with. On a deeper level the theme is man's confrontation with death and his attempt to come to grips with it. The author looks at the human weakness with tenderness and sympathy. Also, there is an effort to overcome the fear of death, and all this makes this novel a great work of art. In a novelist of the range and depth of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, the local gradually merges into the universal. What stands out is the essential human experience which moves the reader anywhere.

    He has killed himself. Why? Was it a threat to his business which brought him money, respect, a standing in the family, more clients and fame? Or was it a different ghost from his shadow life, where he was constantly haunted by his own unfulfilled dreams and delusions? And as the explosive events following his suicide reveal, as in his life, Harbart remains a mystery in death. Nabarun Bhattacharya’s first novel is a landmark in modern Bengali literature for its unconventional story-telling, uncompromising language and brutal honesty. Arunava Sinha’s equally uncompromising translation brings this classic work of black humour to readers in English.

    An amazing, sui generis book, River of Fire spans two and a half millennia. Set during four Indian epochs (the classical, the medieval, the colonial, and the modern post-national), the novel is a meditation on history and human nature, tracing four souls through time. Each section is linked by characters who bear, in every period, the same names: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril. Gautam (appearing first as a student of mysticism at the Forest University of Shravasti in the 4th century B.C.E.) and Champa (throughout embodying the enigmatic experience of Indian women) begin and end the novel; Muslim Kamal appears mid-way through, as the Muslims did, and loses himself in the Indian landscape; and Cyril, the Englishman, appears later still. In different eras, different relations from among the four -- romance and war, possession and dispossession. Yet together the characters reflect the oneness of human nature: amidst the nationalist and religious upheavals of Indian history, Hyder argues for a culture that is inclusive.Interweaving parables, legends, dreams, diaries, and letters, Hyder's prose is lyrical and witty. There is really no book like River of Fire. Qurratulain Hyder was awarded the Bharatiya Gnanpith, India's highest literary award, in 1989, and here is her masterpiece, her broadest canvas and her finest art.

    Nobles at the court of Awadh, the chess-addicts Mir and Mirza, move to an undisclosed location to play undisturbed as their kingdom falls around them..Shorts stories were the inspiration for fourteen of master filmmaker Satyajit Ray's movies, every one of them a classic - Devi, Jalsaghar and Shatranj Ke Khiladi, among them. This book brings together all of those stories in one volume. These tales, by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu and Premchand, are milestones in Indian literature quite apart from their cinematic glory. The anthology also contains two stories by Ray himself -Atithi and Pikoor Diary, that illustrate his own craft as a writer. From the dramatic to the starkly real, the humorous to the dark, the lyrical to the prosaic, Fourteen Stories... sparkles with narrative brilliance. Read together, these stories also provide us with the context for a new insight into the mind of one of India's most loved and revered filmmakers.

    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.

    This selection features twenty-one of the very best stories from the region.Here, the reader will find one of Rabindranath Tagore’s most revered stories ‘The Kabuliwallah’ in a glinting new translation, memorable studies of ordinary people from Tarashankar and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the iconic Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s wrenching study of Bengali society, ‘Mahesh’, as well as over a dozen other astounding stories by some of the greatest practitioners of the form—Buddhadeva Bose, Ashapurna Debi, Premendra Mitra, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Nabarun Bhattacharya, among others. These are stories of anger, loss, grief, disillusionment, magic, politics, trickery, humour and the darkness of mind and heart. They reimagine life in ways that make them unforgettable.

    In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.