Set against the backdrop of the Mahabharata, Desai attempts to make readers aware that although winning is usually the goal in every war, one should also be ready to face defeat.Through Radheya, readers will learn about Karna and the circumstances which earned him a memorable place in the Mahabharata. From early on, Karna was deprived of familial love. Throughout the course of his life, he suffered at the hands of others. He also felt discarded by his own mother Kunti and was also ridiculed by many because he was born in a lower class. Since Karna’s foundation years were so tumultuous, his immense strength was reduced and he often felt lonely.Nevertheless, through Radheya readers can visualize the development of Karna’s individuality and how he came to earn the title of fearless warrior. This novel is essentially a written tribute to the hero Karna who fought against his own family members while remaining loyal to his friend. Through Karna’s decisions and actions, Desai brings to life the impending dualities of life such as victory and defeat, and doing what is expected versus doing what is right. Through Karna, Desai has tried to universalize the “karma katha”.

    Meadows finds just the man to further his phrenological research back home: Amir Ali, confessed member of the infamous Thugee cult. With tales of a murderous youth redeemed, Ali gains passage to England, his villainously shaped skull there to be studied. Only Ali knows just how embroidered his story is, so when a killer begins depriving London’s underclass of their heads, suspicion naturally falls on the “thug.” With help from fellow immigrants led by a shrewd Punjabi woman, Ali journeys deep into a hostile city in an attempt to save himself and end the gruesome murders.Ranging from skull-lined mansions to underground tunnels a ghostly people call home, The Thing about Thugs is a feat of imagination to rival Wilkie Collins or Michael Chabon. Short-listed for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, this sly Victorian role reversal marks the arrival of a compelling new Indian novelist to North America.

    I have no interest in one person killing another. I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. Their imaginations run free, and they soon discover their potential... They are waiting for someone like me.A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the lost and wounded of big-city Seoul, suggesting solace in suicide. Wandering through the bright lights of their high-urban existence, C and K are brothers who fall in love with the same woman - Se-yeon. As their lives intersect, they tear at each other in a struggle to find connection in their fast-paced, atomized world.Dreamlike and cinematic, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself brilliantly affirms Young-ha Kim as Korea's leading young literary master.

    The editor of Kantipur Daily, Wagle's novel is set during the 10-year-long Maoists insurgency in Nepal.Opening on the nameless character referred only as 'I' is an artist and is on the verge of earning prominence with his undaunted skills in art. Few causal yet co-incidental meetings with Palpasa develops into strong feelings between the two. No, this isn't a romantic novel for the emotion is dealt with on a more platonic level here.The story progresses ahead with unexpected twists and turns, and series of co-incidences. Though the scenes appear simple, they bear many marvel points that touch. The book has its share of message and visions for a youthful living along with the suffering we had to go through in the hands of the Maoist and the then government.

    Illustrated by Stina Wirsén, this poignant and moving fable for all ages was originally conceived by the author as a private gift of love for a beloved friend. Featuring a bisexual bunny and an heiress squirrel, by turns witty and absurd, endearing and brave, this little book harbours a fine ache that lends it a timeless quality.

    Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer. Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet. Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life. Written with dark, subtle humor, The Queue describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    It tells on an epic scale the story of a tribal patriarch and his family in the mountainous jungles of Orissa. The slow decline in the fortunes of this family- from the quiet prosperity of a subsistence livelihood towards bondage to the local moneylender- is both poignantly individualized as well as symbolic of the erosion of a whole way of life within peasant communities.

    Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

    . . Jenny Cavilleri, a sharp-tongued, working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe . . .Opposites in nearly every way, Oliver and Jenny are kindred spirits from vastly different worlds. Falling deeply and powerfully, their attraction to one another defies everything they have ever believed—as they share a passion far greater than anything they dreamed possible . . . and explore the wonder of a love that must end too soon.One of the most adored novels of our time, this is the book that defined a generation—a story of uncompromising devotion, of life as it really is . . . and love that changes everything.

    Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

    Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

    More than forty years passed before Devi read Bengal Nights, the novel Eliade had fashioned out of their encounter, only to find small details and phrases, even her given name, bringing back episodes and feelings she had spent decades trying to forget. It Does Not Die is Devi's response. In part a counter to Eliade's fantasies, the book is also a moving account of a first love fraught with cultural tensions, of false starts and lasting regrets.Proud of her intelligence, Maitreyi Devi's father had provided her with a fine and, for that time, remarkably liberal education — and encouraged his brilliant foreign student, Eliade, to study with her. "We were two good exhibits in his museum," Devi writes. They were also, as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. When their secret romance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade from their home. Against a rich backdrop of life in an upper-caste Hindu household, Devi powerfully recreates the confusion of an over-educated child simultaneously confronting sex and the differences, not only between European and Indian cultures, but also between her mother's and father's view of what was right. Amid a tangle of misunderstandings, between a European man and an Indian girl, between student and teacher, husband and wife, father and daughter, she describes a romance unfolding in the face of cultural differences but finally succumbing to cultural constraints. On its own, It Does Not Die is a fascinating story of cultural conflict and thwarted love. Read together with Eliade's Bengal Nights, Devi's "romance" is a powerful study of what happens when the oppositions between innocence and experience, enchantment and disillusion, and cultural difference and colonial arrogance collide. "In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love. . . . Taken together they provide an unusually touching story of young love unable to prevail against an opposition whose strength was tragically buttressed by the uncertainties of a cultural divide."—Isabel Colegate, New York Times Book Review"Recreates, with extraordinary vividness, the 16-year-old in love that she had been. . . . Maitreyi is entirely, disarmingly open about her emotions. . . . An impassioned plea for truth."—Anita Desai, New Republic"Something between a reunion and a duel. Together they detonate the classic bipolarities: East-West, life-art, woman-man."—Richard Eder, New York Newsday"One good confession deserves another. . . . Both books gracefully trace the authors' doomed love affair and its emotional aftermath."—Nina Mehta, Chicago Tribune

    The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

    Her mother has died; her father has left for Singapore. He is a few years older, just back to India from New York.When they meet in a café one afternoon, she—lonely, hungry for experience, yearning to break free of tradition—casts aside her fears and throws herself headlong into a love affair, one that takes her where she has never been before. Told in a voice at once gritty and lyrical, mournful and frank, A Bad Character marks the arrival of an astonishingly gifted new writer. It is an unforgettable hymn to a dangerous, exhilarating city, and a portrait of desire and its consequences as timeless as it is universal.

    There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.