Book picks similar to
A Terrible Matriarchy by Easterine Kire
fiction
indian-writers
literary
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Kasab: The Face of 26/11
Rommel Rodrigues - 2010
They headed for the city's iconic landmarks and the mayhem they unleashed lasted nearly 60 hours. The audacious terror attacks jolted Mumbai like never before. Even as they mourned, the residents of Maximum City demanded answers. But the information they got in return???accounts of the investigation, government rhetoric, newspaper reports, television features, books and even a film???was sketchy at best. Meanwhile, the courts continued with their prosecution of Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving 26/11 gunman. The broad picture available to the public is of the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba and its ringleaders such as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi training, arming and dispatching ten young men in a boat to attack India???s commercial capital. All we have been told about Kasab is that he was just another recruit brainwashed into carrying out the plot against Mumbai. Kasab: The Face of 26/11 breaks new ground by painstakingly piecing together Kasab???s terror trail. The narrative follows Kasab through the bylanes of Pakistani villages and cities as he made his way towards PoK; the dense forests where the terrorist-training camps are situated; the trains, buses and jeeps he boarded; the Indian vessel he and the others hijacked en route to Mumbai???s shores; Kasab???s capture and incarceration. Rommel Rodrigues??? path-breaking investigative journalism fleshes out for the first time the well thought-out planning and organization that lay behind the attacks of 26/11.
A Brutal Hand: There's No Escape (SHORTZ)
Ravi Subramanian - 2020
The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad
Twinkle Khanna - 2016
Sixty-eight-year-old Noni Appa finds herself drawn to a married man – ‘Why do people have to define relationships, underline each word till the paper gives way beneath,’ she wonders. Bablu Kewat becomes obsessed with sanitary napkins much to his family’s horror, and a young woman keeps checking the weather forecast as she meticulously plans each of her five weddings. Funny, observant and wise, this is storytelling at its most irresistible.
Mohini: The Enchantress
Anuja Chandramouli - 2020
These willingly allowed themselves to be bedevilled, consumed by a passion that would not be denied, existing only to serve her will, content to be moulded to suit the purposes of the most enchanting creature in all of creation – Mohini.Distilled from the essence of Vishnu, Mohini, the Enchantress is a part of him and yet she revels in the autonomy and extraordinary powers of beauty, magic and enchantment that are hers to wield. Vivid and ephemeral, she is beloved and desired by all in existence. But she is elusive as the fragment of a forgotten dream, a tantalizing temptress, traipsing her way across the topsy – turvy realms of fable and myth. Her meandering path will see her in the thick of things as the Devas and Asuras churn the ocean of milk to get their hands on the nectar of immortality, blunder into a love triangle that will spark a bloody war, fulfil the last wish of a dead hero, melt into the arms of Mahadeva, the only one capable of enchanting the enchantress and become the mother of Shastha, who will serve as a beacon of hope for all who are considered oddities by a spiteful society that recognizes only two genders amongst the vast multitudes... Set against the tumult and intrigue of a celestial quest for immortality, Anuja Chandramouli brings the extraordinary saga of Mohini to vivid life. Balancing delicately on the tightrope between mythology and reality, she takes the reader on a dizzying ride through the shifting sands of time, gender, love, and desire, deftly intertwining the threads of the past and the present, blurring the lines between fact and fiction while spinning a deliciously entertaining yarn for the ages.
Greed Lust Addiction
Ravi Dabral - 2019
It leaves the readers wondering: Will the protagonist survive in the midst of the powerful lobbies who have scant regard for human life? Or will he be crushed like a beetle under a booted foot, as everyone predicts? Or will he be able to stand up just with the help of a handful of yogis of the Himalayan ashrams and their spiritual followers? The book talks about Materialism Vs Spiritualism. Materialism is the mantra of the modern generation, whose motto is to ‘eat, drink and be merry’. This philosophy gives rise to ‘greed, lust and addiction’ which are vices within us. As against this, spiritualism believes in having ‘virtues, values and morals’ to live a contented, stress-free and purposeful life.
Jasoda
Kiran Nagarkar - 2017
Jasoda is one of the last to leave this 'arse-end of the world' with her children and mother-in-law. Since her husband claims he has important work to do for the local prince, Jasoda must make the journey to the city by the sea on her own. Meanwhile, after years of anonymity, Paar seems poised to take off. Will Jasoda return home with her children? Or stay in the city that's become home for her children? It's taken for granted that epic journeys and epics were possible only during the time of the Mahabharata, the Odyssey, or the Iliad. Even more to the point, the heroes of the epics had to, perforce, be men. The eponymous Jasoda of the novel is about to prove how wrong the assumptions are. Kiran Nagarkar's trenchant narrative traces the journey of a woman of steely resolve and gumption, making her way through an India that is patriarchal, feudal, seldom in the news, and weighed down by dehumanizing poverty."Jasoda is as compelling and powerful as Nagarkar's other novels but uniquely itself in the gut-wrenching story it tells of the sordid uses of power, the suffering it causes, and the human spirit that rises above it." —Nayantara Sahgal "Nagarkar's storytelling genius takes us into the abyss of poverty and patriarchy—source of both inspiration and shame. Jasoda's brutal but transformative journey is the foil to counterfeit historical grandeur. With empathy turned to prose of pure steel, Nagarkar paints a modern Indian heroine." —Mitali Saran "A novel that stops your breath and doesn't let go until you get to the end. Jasoda: mother, murderer or saint? You'll want to put her down. But she won't let you." —Manjula Padmanabhan "No one can spin a yarn with such rollicking exuberance as Kiran Nagarkar, and no one exposes contemporary India's dark underbelly, in all its casual brutality, like him. Jasoda is a tour-de-force of razor-sharp observation and profound compassion, brilliantly realized." —Ritu Menon
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.
Victory Park
Rachel Kerr - 2020
But the truth is life is threadbare and unpromising until the mysterious Bridget moves in to the Park. The wife of a disgraced Ponzi schemer, she brings with her glamour and wild dreams and an unexpected friendship. Drawn in, Kara forgets for a moment who she’s there to protect.
Legal Fiction
Chandan Pandey - 2021
Often used to get around the provisions of constitutions and legal codes.A late-night phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP-Bihar border. The reason — Anasuya's husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared.Soon after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police are refusing to register a missing-persons case, Rafique's student Janaki has also disappeared, and the locals are determined to turn it into a case of 'love jihad'. And when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.Inspired by true events from today's India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.
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.
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.
Em and The Big Hoom
Jerry Pinto - 2012
Between Em, the mother, driven frequently to hospital after her failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, the father, trying to hold things together as best he could, they tried to be a family.
How Insensitive
Russell Smith - 2002
Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.
Eleventh Hour
S. Hussain Zaidi - 2018
It is nine years since the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai and the wounds have still not healed. Especially not for Superintendent of Police Vikrant Singh, who ends up landing a slap on the High Commissioner of Pakistan's face when he meets him at an event. Meanwhile, in Bhopal, five members of the Indian Mujahideen, arrested by Vikrant, break out of the Central Jail. Vikrant, suspended for the diplomatic disaster, is unofficially asked to assist the team tracking the escaped terrorists. In another part of the country, a retired tycoon, a heartbroken ex-soldier and a young woman dealing with demons of her own embark on a journey of self-discovery aboard a cruise liner from Mumbai to Lakshadweep. Fate, however, has other plans, and the cruise liner is hijacked. Racy and riveting, this is Hussain Zaidi at his best.