It is literature written originally in English by authors Indian by birth, ancestry or nationality. It is no part of English literature any more than American literature or Australian literature can be said to be a branch of English literature. It is legitimately a part of Indian literature since it's differentia is the expression in it of Indian ethos. Sahitya Akademi has accepted Indian English Literature as the most suitable applellation for this body of writing. The term emphasises two significant ideas: First that this literature constitutes one of the many streams that join the great ocean called Indian literature, which though written in different languages has an unmistakable unity: Secondly, that it is an inevitable product of the nativization of the English language to express the India sensibility. Professor Naik traces the course of this history from it's beginnings to recent times, dividing it into convenient periods, in an analytical, critical and engaging style.

    Surrounded by the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, Fuling has long been a place of continuity, far from the bustling political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. But now Fuling is heading down a new path, and gradually, along with scores of other towns in this vast and ever-evolving country, it is becoming a place of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. As the people of Fuling hold on to the China they know, they are also opening up and struggling to adapt to a world in which their fate is uncertain.Fuling's position at the crossroads came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. He found himself teaching English and American literature at the local college, discovering how Shakespeare and other classics look when seen through the eyes of students who have been raised in the Sichuan countryside and educated in Communist Party doctrine. His students, though, are the ones who taught him about the ways of Fuling — and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.As he learns the language and comes to know the people, Hessler begins to see that it is indeed a unique moment for Fuling. In its past is Communist China's troubled history — the struggles of land reform, the decades of misguided economic policies, and the unthinkable damage of the Cultural Revolution — and in the future is the Three Gorges Dam, which upon completion will partly flood thecity and force the resettlement of more than a million people. Making his way in the city and traveling by boat and train throughout Sichuan province and beyond, Hessler offers vivid descriptions of the people he meets, from priests to prostitutes and peasants to professors, and gives voice to their views. This is both an intimate personal story of his life in Fuling and a colorful, beautifully written account of the surrounding landscape and its history. Imaginative, poignant, funny, and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

    An indispensable companion for armchair travellers.

    Kodikian freely admitted that he had stabbed Coughlin twice in the heart. Had there been a darker motive than mercy? And how could anyone, under any circumstances, kill his best friend?Armed with the journal Kodikian and Coughlin carried into Rattle- snake Canyon, Jason Kersten re-creates in riveting detail those fateful days that led to the killing in an infamously unforgiving wilderness.

    Over the next three years, 6,693 Gold Star Mothers made the trip. In this emotionally charged, brilliantly realized novel, April Smith breathes life into a unique moment in American history, imagining the experience of five of these women.They are strangers at the start, but their lives will become inextricably intertwined, altered in indelible ways. These very different Gold Star Mothers travel to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery to say final good-byes to their sons and come together along the way to face the unexpected: a death, a scandal, and a secret revealed. None of these pilgrims will be as affected as Cora Blake, who has lived almost her entire life in a small fishing village off the coast of Maine, caring for her late sister’s three daughters, hoping to fill the void left by the death of her son, Sammy, who was killed on a scouting mission during the final days of the war. Cora believes she is managing as well as can be expected in the midst of the Depression, but nothing has prepared her for what lies ahead on this unpredictable journey, including an extraordinary encounter with an expatriate American journalist, Griffin Reed, who was wounded in the trenches and hides behind a metal mask, one of hundreds of “tin noses” who became symbols of the war.  With expert storytelling, memorable characters, and beautiful prose, April Smith gives us a timeless story, by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, set against a footnote of history––little known, yet unforgettable.

    Or sunflowers. (Though it does wax lyrical about some stunning Alpine scenery . . . and, with the race starting in Yorkshire, even some stunning scenery not far from Bradford).From Leeds to Paris (how often do you say that?), Ned details the minutiae of his encounters with the likes of Vincenzo Nibali, David Millar, Chris Froome, Chris Boardman (or ‘Broadman’ as some would have it), Marcel Kittel, Mrs Cavendish (Mark’s wife), Peter Sagan and the rest. Their endeavours, achievements, humour and occasional rancour, sit alongside his own decade-long quest for the ideal end-of-race T-shirt.Ned weaves together the interesting, amusing and unheralded threads of the race itself, and reflects on his own perennial struggle to get round, get on and get by. 101 Damnations encapsulates all that is incredible – and incredibly ordinary – about the greatest race on earth.

    Follow the fates of a group of ultra-ordinary railwaymen as one of them happens across a mysterious ship's log and thereafter falls victim to a major crime. Scooped up by a tide of events way beyond their control, the unlikely band of heroes become the focus of a full-blown, worldwide, media whirlwind and all the while unanswered questions are piling up around them. Paul Gallimore's first novel is a hugely original fusion of ideas, where raw humour transmutes into whodunit, and science fiction blurs with cold fact. What is it that this delightful assortment of misfits has accidentally dragged out into the open? Did the US Navy really conduct a top secret experiment into invisibility in 1943? Just what did happen to the Mary Celeste? And will the truth finally lie somewhere in the ocean between Fulham and Philadelphia? The Mary Celeste Papers is an intelligent, well written, thought provoking funny book; filled to the brim with fully-formed, larger than life characters whose fortunes will grab your attention and hold it in a vice-like grip until the final page has been turned. The Mary Celeste Papers is a people book; about little guys on a big stage and you absolutely deserve to read it.

    It covered 2,000 kilometres and was raced in appalling conditions across the battlefields of the Western Front, otherwise known as the Zone Rouge. The race was so tough that only 21 riders finished, and it was never staged again.With one of the most demanding routes ever to feature in a bicycle race, and plagued by appalling weather conditions, the Circuit des Champs de Bataille was beyond gruelling, but today its extraordinary story is largely forgotten. Many of the riders came to the event straight from the army and had to ride 18-hour stages through sleet and snow across the battlefields on which they had fought, and lost friends and family, only a few months before. But in addition to the hellish conditions there were moments of high comedy, even farce.The rediscovered story of the Circuit des Champs de Bataille is an epic tale of human endurance, suffering and triumph over extreme adversity.

    Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts - no one wore their learning so playfully, nor inspired such passionate friendship.

    Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or–hüzün–that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters–both Turkish and foreign–who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

    From his first, wartime visit - to a land untouched since the Middle Ages - through his frequent returns, he has watched the island and its people as they have changed over the years. In 1998 he returned yet again to write this book, the result of a sixty-year-long fascination with all things Sicilian. In Sicily reveals this fascination on every page. Throughout there is the Mafia, and Lewis's friendships with policemen, journalists and men of respect. But more, he writes of landscape and language, of his memories of his first father-in-law (professional gambler, descendant of princes and member of the Unione Siciliana), of Sicily's changing sexual mores, of the effects of African immigration, of Palermo and its ruined palaces - and of strange superstitions, of witches and bandits and murder.

    So with little more than a change of clothes and two bars of soap, Ma takes off to immerse himself in the remotest parts of China. His journey would last three years and take him through smog-choked cities and mountain villages, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquility. Remarkably written and subtly moving, the result is an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both insider and outsider in his own country could have written.

    This was, without doubt, the most celebrated cohabitation in art history: never, before or since have two such towering artistic talents been penned up in so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history. Predictably, the results were explosive. The dâenouement of their life together has entered into folklore. Two months after Gauguin arrived in Arles, Van Gogh suffered a psychological crisis. He spent most of the rest of his life in a mental institution. Gauguin fled from Arles, and they never saw each other again. But in the brief period during which they worked together a stream of masterpieces was created within the studio they shared. Here, for the first time, the full story of their life together is told.

    The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and of society.

    Over thirty years ago, the man who did such important, pioneering work in Kon-Tiki wrote another best-selling book, Aku-Aku, about Easter Island. More recently, Heyerdahl was invited to return to Easter Island and there confronted the conundrum of the famous, haunting statues that stud the lovely island, massive and mysterious.How were they made? How were they moved? What did the natives mean when they had said, those many years earlier, that "the statues walked"? Who made them--and where did the Easter Islanders themselves come from? What did earlier visitors discover--or believe?It is characteristic of Dr. Heyerdahl's many explorations that his research, his theories, his conclusions all are entwined with objectives greater than mere adventure. Just as his expeditions have been partly in pursuit and proof of his theories that early man traveled further (and faster) than others had previously suspected, and that the peoples of many cultures can work together peacefully, his probes into the past are coupled with an enduring, endearing conviction--never before displayed better than in this volume--that just as we must avoid prejudice in the present, we should not look down on the people of the past--for they and we have more in common than it might seem.