Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.

    Includes tales about an American wife who, homesick for rural Vermont, turns to the hippies of the Indian hills for consolation; and a painter who renders pictures of creatures he has never seen.

    They have almost no idea what awaits them.In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar. Avtar and Randeep are middle-class boys whose families are slowly sinking into financial ruin, bound together by Avtar's secret. Randeep, in turn, has a visa wife across town, whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes in case the immigration agents surprise her with a visit. She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of them all. The Year of the Runaways unfolds over the course of one shattering year in which the destinies of these four characters become irreversibly entwined, a year in which they are forced to rely on one another in ways they never could have foreseen, and in which their hopes of breaking free of the past are decimated by the punishing realities of immigrant life. A novel of extraordinary ambition and authority, about what it means and what it costs to make a new life—about the capaciousness of the human spirit, and the resurrection of tenderness and humanity in the face of unspeakable suffering.

    When Satish offers a bribe to Jitesh, the latter abuses the industrialist and threatens to call the police. Undeterred by all this, Satish approaches Arora who is Jitesh’s senior officer and offers him a share in his business. Arora puts pressure on Jitesh to ignore certain norms and stipulations and approve the loan, but Jitesh succumbs neither to greed nor pressure. Arora and Satish turn hostile towards Jitesh. A few days later at the bank, Jitesh helps an unknown customer, who claims to be illiterate, to fill his withdrawal form. The customer is later identified as a conman who fraudulently withdraws money from someone else’s account. His arch rival Arora manipulates facts and Jitesh is named in the chargesheet. Jitesh is suspended from his job and faces a judicial inquiry that lasts for 14 long and painful years. During the long ordeal, Jitesh is flooded with offers to bribe his way out of the matter and this includes vigilance officers, bank officials, CID officers, court clerks and even the judge. Arora connives with businessmen and amasses huge wealth through underhand means. Arora ignores his family and takes to the wrong path in personal life also. What has destiny in store for him? Is he able to escape from the clutches of justice? ********************************** ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gireesh Sharma, soldier-turned-author, writes straight from his heart. Born in 1973 in a small hamlet near Aligarh, he was brought up by his grandfather-in-law, an active political leader. It was under his tutelage that he developed patriotic fervour and on turning 17 years of age, chose to join the Indian Air Force to serve the nation. After his retirement, he worked with several youth organisations and today actively participates in socio-political activities to bring a positive change in the country. He is working as a marketing manager in a software company and enjoys writing books during his spare time. I Refused to Bribe is his first fiction, though he has written three popular non-fictions: 'Office Politics', 'How to Win the Heart of Your Wife' and 'Stay Free, Stay Happy'.http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=s...

    The present collection of stories, all set in Calcutta of the fifties and sixties, brings together four mysteries that put the sleuth's remarkable mental agility to the ultimate test. In The Menagerie (adapted by master film-maker Satyajit Ray for his 1967 film Chiriakhana) Byomkesh cracks a strange case involving broken motor parts, a seemingly natural death and the peculiar inhabitants of Golap Colony who seem capable of doing just about anything to safeguard the secrets of their tainted pasts. In The Jewel Case, he investigates the mysterious disappearance of a priceless necklace, while in The Will That Vanished he solves a baffling riddle to fulfil the last wish of a close friend. And in The Quills of the Porcupine, the shrewd detective is in his element as he expertly foils the sinister plans of a ruthless opportunist. Byomkesh's exploits just as it does Bandyopadhyay's remarkable portrayal of a city struggling to overcome its colonial past and come into its own.

    NINE NUANCED STORIES THAT EXPLORE THE THEMES OF DESIRE, INTIMACY AND LOVE...A contractor at a dam site develops so obsessive a desire for a tribal woman that he brings home and holds captive another man's wife; a kathak dancer trapped in a marriage of convenience redefines notions of fidelity; an accidental step into an occupied bathroom changes a Delhi servant boy's life forever; a young married couple beleaguered by infertility desperately tries to reignite the romance and passion of their honeymoon on a houseboat in Kashmir...Set across India, each of the stories in this collection unerringly locates the defiant undercurrent of individual expression in people shackled by societal norms.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, "What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Weaving myth, fantasy, and reality, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is, to quote Schulz, "an attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family . . . by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history."

    This collection focuses upon the land he knew and loved so well—Normandy. Its people and its countryside are portrayed here in vivid colour and with great warmth. Amusing, saucy, and sometimes even farcical they may be, but they are also capable of great pathos, often branching off to end tragically. It is this skilful and affecting blend of tragedy and comedy, of tears and laughter, which make Maupassant's Normandy Stories the enduring favourites they are today.11 stories:Disc 1. In the country - Pierrot - A Normandy joke - A cock crowed - Old Boniface's crime - The confession - Disc 2. An apparition - The little cask - The castaway - Bombard - Master Belhomme's beast.

    It establishes Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar as one of our most important contemporary writers.

    The story reflects the social, political and religious scene in Bengal at the turn of the century. The forces that were operating in Bengal at that time were one of the intense nationalism and revival of ancient spiritual values and also that of liberal western thought. What makes Gora a great prose epic is not only its social content but also its brilliant story of self-searching, of resolution, of conflicts and of self discovery.

    This book features a table of contents linked to every chapter. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the eReaders, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including the eReaders, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.

    But instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop and the daughters are confined to the family home.