Backflap: Love the Dark Days
Book Title: Love the Dark Days
Author: Ira Mathur
Love the Dark Days
by Ira Mathur.
Speaking Tiger. Pages 246. Rs 599
Growing up in Bangalore, Poppet unconsciously imbibes the prejudices of class and race of her maternal grandmother. When the family migrates to the multicultural Trinidad, she encounters Indian people with a very different sense of themselves — they are critical of what they perceive as her upper-class airs and graces. Lonely and confused, she begins writing about her experiences to make sense of them. ‘Love the Dark Days’ is an intricate tapestry about class, race, gender that has at its centre a woman’s struggle for identity, love and emotional stability.
Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selective Essays
by Kiran Nagarkar.
Bloomsbury. Pages 317. Rs 699
Culture, society and politics — the late Kiran Nagarkar’s collected essays take us through an India of his times. He writes about the writers and books that influenced him and also provides a deeply retrospective commentary on his own writing. These themes can be further broken down to cover an evolving Bombay, questions of personal and collective memory, the role of the artist in today’s world, and ruminations on culture, world history, and the writer’s own life and work.
In Pursuit of Freedom
by Pradeep Damodaran.
HarperCollins. Pages 349. Rs 599
Pradeep Damodaran uses travel as a tool to explore the idea of freedom. He travels the length and breadth of the country — from places that played an important role in the Independence movement, such as Sabarmati, Dandi and Jhansi, to sites of contemporary significance, like Nandigram, Unnao and Kudankulam. The author meets survivors of riots, descendants of freedom fighters, social workers, environmental activists, farmers and ordinary citizens to discover what freedom means to them.
Delhi — A Nature Journal
by Anuradha Kumar-Jain.
Rupa. Pages 223. Rs 695
A record of Delhi’s changing seasons in an urban landscape and flora and fauna, this nature journal urges the reader to stop, listen, observe and reconnect with this magical performance that is enacted everywhere, every day. Lying in the tropics, Delhi is sufficiently distant from the equator to enjoy largely distinct seasons, each of which brings with it its own flavour — from the golden cascades of laburnum in summer to the indigo skies of monsoon, the riotous blooms of winter and the nesting birds of spring.
