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Haunted by the
past
Aradhika Sharma
Secrets & Lies
By Jaishree Misra.
Avon.
Pages 406. Rs 275.
JAISHREE
MISRA admits that she’s not writing to win a Booker’s Prize. Her
novels fall neither in the realm of pulp fiction nor does she expect
high critical acclaim for them. "My books are not very
literary," she says, "but if you really must categorise
them, I would call my kind of writing quality commercial
fiction."
Words
& colours of love
Geetu Vaid
Amrita and Imroz — In The
Times Of Love And Longing
Translated by Arvinder.
Full Circle.
Pages 192. Rs 295.
A
lot has been written about
love and its different shades. Love — that ethereal feeling which,
though can’t be fully expressed either in words or in colours, is
invariably bound in these two in its pristine expression.
Voice
of dissent
Parbina Rashid
Burning Bright: Irom Sharmila
and the Struggle for Peace in Manipur
By Deepti Priya Mehrotra.
Penguin Books India.
Pages 219. Rs 275.
THE
red cover of the book, with Irom Sharmila’s intense face on it,
arrests my attention at the window display of a local bookstore.
Curiosity gets the better of me and I ask the shop owner, "How is
the book selling in this part of the country?"
Assuaging
bruised psyche
Puneetinder Kaur Sidhu
Thoughts for the Young Minds
By Asif Jalal.
Global Media Publications.
Pages 206. Rs 199.
GET
over it, and get on with it, urges Asif Jalal, author of some of the
most inspirational contemporary writings. An earnest endeavour
to address Muslim teenagers plagued with complexes, his book attempts
to assist impressionable minds in dropping anchor towards the pursuit
of a more meaningful life.
Saga
of feminine valour
Kanchan Mehta
Kashmir: The History and
Pandit Women’s
Struggle for Identity
By Suneethi Bakshi.
Vitasta. Pages 362. Rs 695.
FOR
its composite cultural heritage, vast hoard of dynasts and tempestuous
last few decades, Kashmir has ever served as an inexhaustible,
monumental subject of history.
Enter
“Digi-novel”
Michelle Nichols
IS
it a book? Is it a movie? Is it a website? Actually it’s all three.
Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
US television series, is releasing what he calls a "digi-novel"
combining all three media and giving a jolt to traditional book
publishing.
An
Egyptian revelation
Jerome Taylor
A
Britain-based academic
has uncovered a fragment of the world’s oldest Bible hiding
underneath the binding of an 18th-century book, which dates from about
AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the
library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.
A
great popular writer of his age
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
SITTING
in El Vino's with Keith Waterhouse... No, that's too obvious a way to
remember any journalist. But where else would I have been with Keith,
afterwards? This is not to suggest that Keith's whole life was spent
eating, drinking and talking, although a good deal of it was.
SHORT TAKES
Satire in
epistles
Randeep Wadehra
Gandhi’s Epistle to Obama
By KB Ganapathy.
Leadstart Publishing.
Pages 88. Rs 125.
Satire should, like a polished
razor keen,Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen. —-
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
Although
shown singular in the
title these are, actually, 20 epistles serialised in the form of a
meandering, near-witty narrative that wriggles through a web of
digressions, flashbacks and detours.
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