Anjali Joseph processes bewilderment ♦ If Anjali Joseph’s second novel is best devoured in one sitting, it’s not because it wouldn’t hold up to slow, literary scrutiny. Rather, it’s because Another Country is the refreshing opposite of that “urgent book” that demands moral engagement. It builds character-driven emotional momentum through protagonist Leela’s peregrinations through Paris, …
Tabish Khair spins a tale out of the failed 2010 attack on a Danish cartoonist ♦ In his third novel, Tabish Khair uses a botched murder attempt that brought media attention to Aarhus, the Danish town where he lives, to spin a fictional, behind-the-scenes account of the event. The attempt – a failed attack in …
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Amitabha Bagchi’s second novel focuses on corruption in Delhi ♦ Naresh Kumar, the householder of the title, is having a little trouble holding his home together. As PA to a powerful Delhi bureaucrat, Kumar has a routine but tenuously balanced life that’s built, like a pack of cards, on years of under-the-table transactions, shady deals …
Anjum Hasan’s short stories score on pacing and plot ♦ Tortured as some of them are, it’s a pleasure to slip inside the minds of the characters of Anjum Hasan’s fourth book. In this collection of 13 perfect short stories, Hasan picks moments out of ordinary lives set in Bangalore, Shillong (where she grew up) …
Palash Krishna Mehrotra on India’s flitty young things ♦ Form shouldn’t always mirror content. Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s musings on “the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth” flit from subject to subject in short chapters, resting a moment on the bloom of homosexual rights (“Gay ho!”, eight pages), then on the thorny issue of morality …
Alan Hollinghurst teases out the thoughts behind his character’s smallest actions ♦ The opening image would enchant any serious reader: a 16-year-old girl reading poetry in a hammock in an English garden. Her mind wanders from Tennyson to the impending visit of Cecil Valance, a poet and young nobleman who is her brother’s friend and, though …
Jabeen Akhtar knocks stereotypes out of focus ♦ Samira Tanweer just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately for the former political analyst, being back in the bosom of her Pakistani-American family isn’t going to make it easy for her to put back together the pieces of her recently shattered life. Samira indulges in a fair amount …
Nayantara Sahgal ♦ “Politicians, whatever their political colour, and whatever they piously said, got fat from office. They would never banish the contrasts, never in ten thousand years build an equal society. How could they, when they were products of the rot themselves, of caste, of vested interests and stinking old ideas? It would take the …