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Category: Fiction

  • The Mirror of Beauty

    Shamsur Rahman FaruqiPenguin, 2014 Originally written and published in Urdu as Kai Chaand Thhe Sar-e-Aasmaan (‘There Were Many Moons in the Pinnacle of the Sky’), this epic novel was later translated into English by its author, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. I think the Urdu title is far more evocative (and poetic.…

  • Like Being Alive Twice

    Dharini BhaskarPenguin Random House India Pvt Ltd, 2024 (From my review for Open: The Magazine) Dharini Bhaskar’s Like Being Alive Twice is an unusual novel, straddling genres and styles with rare aplomb. Set in a dystopian India, this is a love story with a difference: a story that was, and…

  • The Thief’s Funeral: The Book Review Anthology of Short Fiction

    Various (Ed. Sucharita Sengupta, Uma Iyengar, Chandra Chari)Aleph Book Company, 2024 A book in which I have a short story—and there’s a slightly embarrassing back story to that. Apparently (I have no recollection of this, to be honest) back in 2020, during the Covid lockdown, The Book Review Literary Trust…

  • Delhi: A Novel

    Khushwant SinghPenguin Books India, 1990 The sutradhar (so to say; something like the central character and narrator, though he is by no means so through much of the book) of Delhi: A Novel is a sixty-year-old man who is never named. He lives on his own, with a cook who…

  • Jade Dragon Mountain

    Elsa HartMinotaur Books, 2015 A southern corner of China, 1708. In the town of Dayan (modern-day Lijiang, in Yunnan province), Li Du, an exiled former librarian of Peking’s Forbidden City arrives to present his papers to the local magistrate, Tulishen (who, incidentally, is also Li Du’s cousin, though with his…

  • Razor Sharp

    Ashwin SanghiHarper Collins Publishers, 2024 (From my review for The New Indian Express, here). Detective fiction is riddled with flawed cops. Ian Rankin’s DI Rebus; PD James’s Adam Dalgleish. Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley, and—closer home—Anita Nair’s Borei Gowda. All prove, in their way, that fictional detectives need not be paragons.…

  • The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories

    Subimal Misra (Tr. V Ramaswamy)Harper Perennial (an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers), 2024 (From my review for Open: The Magazine, here) Most of us, over the many centuries books have been in existence, have grown conditioned to a certain style that we expect from stories. A building up, a climax,…

  • Hot Stage

    Anita NairHarper Collins Publishers, 2023 (From my review for The New Indian Express, here) In Cut Like Wound, the first book of Anita Nair’s Borei Gowda series, Inspector Gowda went up against a formidable opponent, a cross-dressing man who called himself Bhuvana. Even as Gowda dealt with a new subordinate…

  • From Below

    Darcy CoatesPoisoned Pen Press, 2022 I am not one of those people who like the sea. Perhaps the fact that I never learnt to swim has something to do with it; perhaps my bordering-on-OCD dislike of suspect water (fish shit in it!) is responsible. Perhaps, too, I have all-too-vivid recollections…

  • Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot, #24)

    Agatha ChristieFirst published by Collins Crime Club, UK, 1941 One of the things I really admire about Agatha Christie’s writing—besides the intricate plotting, the excellent characterization and the occasional wit—is her fluid and easy story-telling. It may be a bit deceptive at times, especially when she flings her reader into…

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