The Byword/Review
Never Never Land review: In Namita Gokhale’s Novel, The Hills Are Alive
Namita Gokhale’s Never Never Land follows Iti Arya, a disillusioned editor, as she retreats to the Himalayan cottage of her childhood, seeking solace and self-discovery
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Tom Perrotta’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win: A manifesto for regret
In this #MeToo-inspired novel, a pivotal American figurine finds her clemency
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B. M. Zuhara’s The Dreams of a Mappila Girl: Empathy for a life once lived
‘The Dreams of a Mappila Girl’, the memoir of B.M. Zuhara, the first Muslim woman writer from Kerala, has been translated from Malayalam by Fehmida Zakeer
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‘The Ink Black Heart’: Robert Galbraith’s new-age locked room mystery
JK Rowling's latest novel, written under Robert Galbraith synonym, mirrors our naturally unnatural cohabitation of the real and the hyperreal, the offline and the online worlds
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Deepti Naval’s A Country Called Childhood: Misty Watercolour Memories
Partition played a role in Deepti Naval’s family life — her parents met in Lahore and somehow managed to cross the border — though the small village to which Naval’s Piti (as she called her father) belonged was wiped out in an act of mindless genocide
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‘The Middle Finger’: A Radical Post-millennial Adaptation of An Epic Story
Saikat Majumdar’s latest novel dissects social entitlement and creative ownership
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I Have Not Seen Mandu: An Audacious Memoir Of A Writer’s Descent Into Madness
As much as it is a book about memories, it is also a book about the nature of language and the limitation of words to convey that which had plagued the darkest corners of a troubled mind
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Kunal Basu’s In An Ideal World: An Old Country Of Young People
Basu’s fiction is an unflinching reminder to his readers across the English-speaking world that the ‘children of men’ and ‘of war’ are not just ours, or theirs
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Ari Gautier’s The Thinnai breaks new ground in Franco-Indian Dalit writing
The Franco-Indian Dalit novelist portrays the life and times of Dalit communities in the postcolonial world
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Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey by Sathya Saran
Through this book, Sathya, with her journalistic and fictional prowess, has touched the core of a new genre of writing
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‘Golden: Bangladesh At 50’, an anthology of short stories and poems, celebrates its glorious literary voices
Brought out to mark Bangladesh’s liberation anniversary, the anthology, edited by Shazia Omar, celebrates Bangladesh, a young nation with countless possibilities and endless aspirations
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J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig: A Fantastic Fairytale That Will Melt Your Heart
It is the story of a boy’s love for his lost toy, one of his most prized possessions, and his search to find it
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Arjun Rajendran’s One Man Two Executions explores connections between the past and present
The poems in the collection take us back to the politics and intrigue of the 18th century India, with the Mughal empire on the wane, various factions such as the Marathas, squabbling over different areas, and rival European countries battling to gain a foothold
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Rohit Trilokekar’s The Perfect Outside: Unboxing Life into the Imperfect ‘Inside’
The book leaves the reader high on life… [It] sets us free from the illusionary “bars” we have caged ourselves in…[It] holds great therapeutic value and serves as a fine example of the profound healing bibliotherapy can achieve.
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Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, winner of Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a spellbinding tale about finding liberation in loneliness
Piranesi’s being and becoming, a peculiar mélange of the surreal and the earthly, is the state of mind all of us have longed to achieve, especially during the pandemic
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Mary Lawson’s Booker-longlisted novel, A Town Called Solace, is about the need to be loved and the desire to love
In the third novel by the UK-based author, family is the cornerstone around which the themes of death, love and loss revolve
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Why Ismat Chughtai Remains Relevant As a Feminist Icon
Chughtai, whose birth anniversary falls today, strikes right at the festering sore of the society — the deeply entrenched patriarchal culture
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Languages Of Truth: Rushdie’s “Noah’s Ark” For Art
Languages of Truth is Salman Rushdie’s much-awaited treatise on art, a self-portrait of the artist as a septuagenarian as well as a mini-encyclopaedia of the arts — all at the same time
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Reflections on a Collaborative Novel by Nine Authors
The novel has been translated from Odia by Himansu S. Mohapatra, former professor, Dept. of English, Utkal University, India, and Paul St. Pierre, former professor, Dept. of Linguistics and Translation, Universitie de Montreal, Canada
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Shamayita Sen’s For the Hope of Spring: If Winter Comes, Can Spring Be Far Behind?
From scribbles to final touches, For the Hope of Spring emerges as a celebration of hybridity. This hybridity is not just in content but also in form, as Sen dabbles in various styles
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Last Queen: The Captivating Story of Rani Jindan Kaur
The novel brings to life the youngest queen of the greatest Sikh ruler, Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Daughter of a kennel keeper, Kaur became a member of the royalty, gave birth to the King’s heir, found love again after she was widowed at 21, and valiantly fought the British
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Recollection and Reconciliation in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life
Real Life’s narrative deals, at a time, with so many old issues, shedding new lights on, peeling the imposed truths and white lies out: the fluidity of reality in respect of space and time; the fixation of identity in terms of race and sexual orientation; and the refined understandings of loss, grief, memory and mourning.
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Breath of Gold: Hariprasad Chaurasia by Sathya Saran
Sathya Saran ’s book captures the Padma Vibhushan awardees’s life, his love for music, his unceasing quest to learn, his devotion to his guru Annapurna Devi, and his partnerships with Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma and others
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Rituparna Roy’s Gariahat Junction
Roy weaves a web of spaces, each trapped within the other. If at the centre of it lies the mind, the outermost circle is occupied by the home. It is strange how, even today, while telling the tales of women, one cannot but not situate it within the home turf.
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Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte: A Hall of Mirrors
Cervantes classic Don Quixote makes a reverberating Rushdian comeback. Quichotte is a testament of the modern man’s invincible courage and unwavering hope: a much needed reiteration of faith in a greener earth and a brighter future for our children
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Gun Island: Climate Change & Refugees
In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh addresses the most pressing concerns of our times
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Mehr: Love Across the Border
Mehr, a cross-border love story by Siddhartha Gigoo, is a work of realistic fiction. This novel is set in the territories of India and Pakistan. It reveals the catastrophic collapse of the situation, futility of violence, pain and restlessness of the people residing in the conflict zone and the intricacies of the relationship between the two countries.
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Kala Ramesh: Beyond Infinity
Kala Ramesh’s first book of haiku and haibun, Beyond the Horizon Beyond, is a piece of cosmos ripped off to give us a glimpse of the vastness that lies beyond infinity
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Gulzar: Prophet of Pain
Gulzar’s first novel Two is not just his search for a catharsis from the Partition and its wounds; it is a bell sounding out the possibility of other Partitions that could be brewing in the darkness of human minds
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Upamanyu Chatterjee: Meat of the Matter
The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian is tightly conceived and though slim, packs quite a punch, dissecting India’s descent into atavistic madness over meat and its hopelessly flawed judicial system
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Suspended Bodies of Transit
Sam Wallman’s Poignant Graphic Journalism in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centers: A Guard’s Story”
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The Big, Blue Drawer of Memory
Available Light, CP Surendran’s book of poems, is luminous
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The Life of a Woman
In One Day We’LL All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, the crux of Scaachi Koul's essays deals with growing up and living in Canada, a country known to be an ideal refuge for immigrants barred by a belligerent neighbouring country
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Journey of a star who held her own, milestone by milestone
The colourful and eventful life of yesteryear actress Asha Parekh
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On Song: 29 luminaries on Beatles
In Their Lives is an anthology of essays from 29 luminaries singing praises of their favourite Beatles songs
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To the Middle of Love: A collection that crackles with energy
Omar Sabbagh’s fourth collection of poems opens with a birth, ends with lament and a meditation on suicide, and in between, offers inventive twists on the age-old stories of identity, love and grief
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Shazia Omar's Dark Diamond: A riotous ride on a time machine
Shazia Omar's Dark Diamond transports the reader into a magical world, beyond past, present or future, the world of the writer’s imagination.
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