Book picks similar to
The Lost Child by Mulk Raj Anand
short-stories
classics
collected-short
middle-grade
The Goat Thief
Perumal Murugan - 2017
He trains his unsentimental eye on men and women who live in the margins of our society. He tells their stories with deep sympathy and calm clarity. A lonely night watchman falls in love with the ghost of a rape victim. A terrified young goat thief finds himself surrounded by a mob baying for his blood. An old peasant exhausted by a lifetime of labour is consumed by jealousy and driven to an act of total destruction. Set in the arid Kongu landscape of rural Tamil Nadu, these tales illuminate the extraordinary acts that make up everyday lives.
Things Tom Likes: A book about sexuality and masturbation for boys and young men with autism and related conditions
Kate E. Reynolds - 2014
He likes singing and watching TV in the family room. There are also things that Tom enjoys doing in private, like touching his penis.This accessible and positive resource helps parents and carers teach boys with autism or other special needs about masturbation. It covers when and where it is appropriate and helps to establish boundaries surrounding privacy more generally. With simple but explicit illustrations, this book provides the perfect platform to talk about sexuality with boys and young men with autism or special needs.
Between the Assassinations
Aravind Adiga - 2008
It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed. A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A privileged schoolboy, using his own ties to the Kittur underworld, sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. A childless couple takes refuge in a rapidly diminishing forest on the outskirts of town, feeding a group of "intimates" who visit only to mock them. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed. Between the Assassinations showcases the most beloved aspects of Adiga's writing to brilliant effect: the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast; and the prodigiously ambitious narrative talent that has earned Adiga acclaim around the world and comparisons to Gogol, Ellison, Kipling, and Palahniuk. In the words of The Guardian (London), "Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years." A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.
Love without a story
Arundhathi Subramaniam - 2019
Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.
Bony-Legs
Joanna Cole - 1983
When a terrible witch vows to eat her for supper, a little girl escapes with the help of a mirror and comb given to her by the witch's cat and dog.
The Stranger in my Bed (Quickies)
Shanaya Taneja - 2017
Her bags are packed and she is all set for the new life. But she wants to pamper herself and enjoy, coz it’s her last day in Delhi, where she has spent some really good times. She is out exploring when she bumps into a stranger; he sweeps her off her feet with his magnetic charm, way with words and a well-chiseled body.What’s the harm of having a good time, she wonders! After all, she’d be gone the next day – no strings attached. While she gets adventurous, she barely knows what life is planning to throw at her. Will the chance meeting turn into something more? Will she find out about The Stranger in my Bed.
Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History
Romila Thapar - 2004
The story of the raid has reverberated in Indian history, but largely during the raj. It was first depicted as a trauma for the Hindu population not in India, but in the House of Commons. The triumphalist accounts of the event in Turko-Persian chronicles became the main source for most eighteenth-century historians. It suited everyone and helped the British to divide and rule a multi-millioned subcontinent.In her new book, Romila Thapar, the doyenne of Indian historians, reconstructs what took place by studying other sources, including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings and merchants of the period, court epics and popular narratives that have survived. The result is astounding and undermines the traditional version of what took place. These findings also contest the current Hindu religious nationalism that constantly utilises the conventional version of this history.
The Wish Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree
Bill Brittain - 1983
(A) literary folk story at its best".--School Library Journal. Newbery Honor Book; ALA Notable Children's Book.
Chanakya
Ashok K. Banker - 2018
Master administrator. Author of the Arthashastra. But before the legend, there was the boy: Vishnu Gupta.
Pataliputra, capital of the great Nanda empire, is teeming with crime and corruption. Granted unlimited authority by the hedonistic emperor Mahapadma Nanda, evil mastermind Maha-amatya Kartikeya has the city in a vice-like grip. But another name bubbles up through the chaos; there is talk of a young genius, Vishnu Gupta. When the Maha-amatya investigates the rumours, he recognises a future rival in the boy. He is determined to destroy this competition from the roots – family and all. Vishnu must gather all his wits and his formidable knowledge to protect everything he holds dear. The holy scriptures, his brilliant interpretations of the Vedas and the power of his unmatched mind: these are the only tools he has against the might of the most powerful man in the empire. Epic storyteller Ashok K. Banker imagines the life and formative years of India’s greatest genius, a man whose influence persists down the ages. In this first instalment of a thrilling trilogy, he recreates Chanakya’s early struggles and triumphs.
Stephen King: The Playboy Interview
Stephen King - 1983
This is the interview with the horror author Stephen King from the June 1983 issue.
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth - 1993
Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.
The Immortals of Meluha
Amish Tripathi - 2010
In what modern Indians mistakenly call the Indus Valley Civilisation. The inhabitants of that period called it the land of Meluha a near perfect empire created many centuries earlier by Lord Ram, one of the greatest monarchs that ever lived. This once proud empire and its Suryavanshi rulers face severe perils as its primary river, the revered Saraswati, is slowly drying to extinction. They also face devastating terrorist attacks from the east, the land of the Chandravanshis. To make matters worse, the Chandravanshis appear to have allied with the Nagas, an ostracised and sinister race of deformed humans with astonishing martial skills!The only hope for the Suryavanshis is an ancient legend: When evil reaches epic proportions, when all seems lost, when it appears that your enemies have triumphed, a hero will emerge.Is the rough-hewn Tibetan immigrant Shiva, really that hero? And does he want to be that hero at all? Drawn suddenly to his destiny, by duty as well as by love, will Shiva lead the Suryavanshi vengeance and destroy evil?
Latitudes of Longing
Shubhangi Swarup - 2018
The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself. A young writer awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in India for this novel, Shubhangi Swarup is a storyteller of extraordinary talent and insight. Richly imaginative and wryly perceptive, Latitudes of Longing offers a soaring view of humanity: our beauty and ugliness, our capacity to harm and love each other, and our mysterious and sacred relationship with nature.
The Storyteller's Tale
Omair Ahmad - 2008
When the beautiful and lonely lady of the manor invites him to stay and share a story, his grief at the destruction of his glorious city spills forth in a story of two brothers, Taka and Wara - wolf and boy - a tale of love and loyalty, hurt and distrust. The storyteller is amazed when the lady, or Begum, responds with a tale of her own, of Aresh and Barab, and a friendship that transcends death. Transfixed by their storytelling duel and shocked by the discovery of forbidden love, the pair draw out their stories in order to delay the moment of their parting. Part fable, part fantasy, The Storyteller's Tale captures the twilight of the Mughals and transports the reader to the stunning setting of an unforgettable brief encounter. Adapting ancient traditions of storytelling, skilfully weaving history and the lives of ordinary people in a landscape of war and devastation, Ahmad's finely drawn tale draws from the great folklore traditions of One Thousand and One Nights and the Tales of Genji.