Anita Desai

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Set in contemporary Bombay and other cities, these stories reflect the kaleidoscope of urban life - evoking the colour, sounds and white-hot heat of the city. Warm, perceptive, humorous and touched with sadness, Anita Desai's stories are peopled with intensely individual characters - the man spiritually transformed by the surface texture of a melon; the American wife who, homesick for the verdant farmlands of Vermont, turns to the hippies in the Indian hills; the painter living in a slum who fills his canvasses with flowers, birds and landscapes he has never seen.

Games At Twilight

A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas make up Anita Desai's exquisite new book. Set in modern India, but where history still casts a long shadow, the stories move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. 
 
Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these stories remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.

The Artist of Disappearance

Whole lives come into focus in this rich and diverse collection, as Desai trains her luminous spotlight on private universes from India to Canada and New England, from Cornwall to Mexico.  Her protagonists set out on journeys and find themselves suddenly beyond the pale, or surprisingly back where they started from.  Caught up in cycles of hope and disappointment, their lives are ruled by the seasons, or straitjacketed by the conventions of hospitality, friendship and family.  In the title story, a beloved dog, black as Satan, brings nothing but disaster; in another, a business man away from home sees his own death; and elsewhere, old relationships stir up buried resentments, issues demand commitment - or escape.  And in the final quiet masterpiece, one of Delhi's girls of slender means finds a kind of joy and freedom in a strange rooftop community.

Diamond Dust & Other Stories

Nanda Kaul is old. She has chosen to spend her last years high up in the mountains where she can arrange her thoughts into tranquility. But her solitude is broken when her fragile and secretive great-grand-daughter, Raka, comes to stay. It is an intrusion Nanda Kaul deeply resents, but this child has a capacity to change things. Through the long hot summer months hidden dependencies and old wounds are uncovered, until tragedy seems as inevitable as a forest fire on the hillsides surrounding the villa.

Fire On The Mountain

Like so many other young Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of 'the Mother', but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother's own story - from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.

Journey to Ithaca

Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small-town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India's greatest Urdu poet, Nur - a project that can only end in disaster.

In Custody

Eric is an uncertain, awkward young man, a would-be writer, and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload, but gradually seduced - by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world. He finds himself on a curious quest for his own family in a 'ghost' mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. On the Día de los Muertos, the feast day when the locals celebrate and remember their dead, the various strands of the novel come together hauntingly, bringing together past and present in a moment of quiet, powerful epiphany.

The Zigzag Way

Salman Rushdie

Elizabeth West

Seamus Deane

The Indian subcontinent has produced some of the world's greatest writers, and a body of literature unsurpassed in its sustained imagination, impassioned lyricism and sparkling tragi-comedy. Now Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West have collected together the finest Indian writing of the last fifty years. Published to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence, it is an anthology of extraordinary range and vigour, as exciting and varied as the land that inspired it. 
 
Including works by: 
 
Mulk Raj Anand 
Gita Mehta 
Anjana Appachana 
Ved Mehta 
Vikram Chandra 
Rohinton Mistry 
Upamanyu Chatterjee 
R. K. Narayan 
Amit Chaudhuri 
Jawaharlal Nehru 
Nirad C. Chaudhuri 
Padma Perera 
Anita Desai 
Satyajit Ray 
Kiran Desai 
Arundhati Roy 
G. V. Desani 
Salman Rushdie 
Amitav Ghosh 
Nayantara Sahgal 
Githa Hariharan 
I. Allan Sealy 
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 
Vikram Seth 
Firdaus Kanga 
Bapsi Sidhwa 
Mukul Kesavan 
Sara Suleri 
Saadat Hasan Manto 
Shashi Tharoor 
Kamala Markandaya 
Ardashir Vakil

Vintage Book Of Indian Writing 1947 - 1997

Janet Davey

Anita Mostyn feels the need to take a holiday from her life. As a child, she was dismissed by her parents in favour of her more confident brothers, and as an adult, her choices are disapproved of – the small art gallery she works for, the friends she makes, the men she sees. On a whim, she takes up an offer to scout for holiday properties in Bulgaria, escaping the impending second wedding of her perfect brother. But as Anita navigates these difficult waters, a horrifying episode in her past – the thing she has really been trying to escape – comes back to haunt her.

By Battersea Bridge

Ross Raisin

From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom. 
 
'One of our best novelists' Daily Mail 
'A superb achievement' Guardian 
'Moving...and beautiful' Irish Times 
 
Anita is a talented sous-chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. 
 
As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds, Anita must make a decision: should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick used to be? 
 
It's a decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past - and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life.

A Hunger

From the prizewinning author of GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

Alice Albinia

Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving back to Delhi after years of exile in New York. She knows her return will disrupt precariously balanced lives. Twenty years ago her sister Meera died, taking a devastating secret with her. Now, as the family gathers for a wedding, Leela must sift truth from fiction. 
 
Meanwhile the bride's father plots political conquest, the groom realises that he has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be, and Ganesh - elephant-headed god and scribe of India's great epic, the Mahabharata - claims both Leela and the novel as his own creation. 
 
Brilliantly playful and entertaining, Leela's Book weaves a poignant tale of contemporary life in an ancient city.

Leela's Book

Anita Nair

Meet Akhilandeswari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider. Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women she is travelling with the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to feel complete? 
 
This wonderfully atmospheric, deliciously warm novel takes the reader into the heart of women's lives in contemporary India, revealing how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with husbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same the world over.

Ladies Coupe

Karin Fossum

Gunder Jomann, a quiet, middle-aged man from a peaceful Norwegian community, thinks his life has been made complete when he returns from a trip to India a married man. But on the day his Indian bride is due to join him, he is called to the hospital to his sister's bedside. The local taxi driver sent instead to meet the bride at the airport returns without her. Then the town is shocked by the news of an Indian woman found bludgeoned to death in a nearby meadow. 
 
Inspector Sejer and his colleague Skarre head the murder inquiry, cross-examining the townsfolk and planting seeds of suspicion in a community which has always believed itself to be simple, safe and trusting. For what can only have been an unpremeditated and motiveless act of violence, everyone is guilty until proven innocent.

Calling out for You

Yangzom Brauen

Kusang never thought she would leave Tibet. Growing up in a remote mountain village, she married a monk and gave birth to two children. But then the Chinese army invaded, and their peaceful lives were destroyed forever. Thousands were tortured, prison camps were set up and Kusang's monastery was destroyed. 
 
The family were forced to flee across the Himalayas in the depths of winter, battling cold, fear, starvation and exhaustion. It took a month to reach India, where they were then passed from one refugee camp to another, all the while fighting hunger and disease. Kusang's husband and her younger child died, but somehow Kusang and her daughter Sonam survived. 
 
In Across Many Mountains Sonam's daughter, Yangzom, born in safety in Switzerland, has written the story of her inspirational mother and grandmother's fight for survival, and their lives in exile. It is an extraordinary story of determination, love and endurance.

Across Many Mountains

The Extraordinary Story of Three Generations of Women in Tibet

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
World-weary, distracted and more often than not the worse for wine, Michael Booth really needed to make some major changes to his life. Instead, he embarks on an over-ambitious, self-indulgent attempt to write the definitive book on Indian food, taking his wife and two young children in tow. 
 
They criss-cross India, from mist-shrouded Delhi to Mumbai and the slums of Dharavi, meeting the locals and samplying different cuisines along the way. However, his plan is derailed as he spirals deeper into his metaphysical middle-aged malaise, finally unravelling amid the sweltering heat of the Keralan backwaters. 
 
Fortunately, his wife takes control and enrolls her disintegrating husband in a hardcore yoga boot camp, enlisting a wise meditation guru who helps him chart a path towards enlightenment. But will Booth's cynicism and untrammelled appetites prove his undoing? Can he regain his balance, conquer his anxieties and face up to life as a husband and father?

Eat Pray Eat

Martin Buckley

The Ramayana - the Journey of Rama - is India's best-loved book, an inspiration to school-children, monks and moviemakers, yet it is virtually unknown in the Western world. The story of Rama, an exiled prince searching savage jungles for his kidnapped wife, it mixes Homer's Odyssey with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is an ancient epic, at once violent, spiritual and erotic. Yet it also lies at the heart of India's fiercest modern controversy, the Hindu-Muslim clash that has claimed 13,000 lives since 1992. 
 
When Martin Buckley first encountered the Ramayana twenty-five-years ago, it seemed a key to unlocking the myriad mysteries of Indian life. He dreamed of retracing the journey of the blue-skinned warrior god from his birthplace in North India to the climax of his confrontation with evil in Sri Lanka. Buckley's own physical and spiritual odyssey, a sometimes perilous passage through India by motorbike, microlight, bus and train, offers unique and passionate insights into the heart of India - ancient and modern.

An Indian Odyssey

Jehanne Wake

The Caton sisters were Southern belles descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and were expected to 'marry a Plantation'. But they were independent, fascinated by politics, clever with money, romantic in mood. Arriving In London in 1816 the three sisters forged their own destinies in the face of intense prejudice, against both Americans and Catholics. The widowed Marianne shocked the world by marrying the Wellington's wayward elder brother, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and appearing as a 'Catholic Yankee' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish. Louisa eventually became Duchess of Leeds, and a friend of Queen Victoria, while the sphere in which Bess shone was the stockmarket, as queen of speculators. 
 
Based on intimate unpublished letters, Sisters of Fortune is a brilliant portrait of love between sisters, a most unusual story of money and power and a fascinating glimpse of how these extraordinary women influenced the social and international relations of their time.

Sisters of Fortune

The First American Heiresses to Take England by Storm

Gita Mehta

Born a princess of the Royal Household of Balmer, Jaya Singh is torn between the traditions of her upbringing and the ideals of the Mahatma, as India draws inexorably towards the bloody struggle for independence from the British Raj. 
 
To fulfil her role as the guardian of the people, Jaya must first win her own freedom - then lead her kingdom through treacherous changes of history to the moment when palace and country will triumph over destiny. 
 
Grounded in details of ancient royal tradition and Hindu ritual, Jaya's story counterpoints a vanished way of life against the complex political realities involved in the passing of the Raj and the birth of the modern nations of India and Pakistan.

R K Narayan

'In the title story of this collection of marvellous stories, the narrator, a novelist, sits at the elbow of his grandmother as she tells of how her mother, betrothed at seven years old, had to pursue her runaway "husband" halfway across the subcontinent.In "Guru", a corrupt, grasping official gets his comeuppance, not so much because he is crooked but because he fails to honour a financial pledge made to his daughters-in-law.In "Salt and Sawdust", when a young woman embarks on a career as a novelist the characters are again made to tread the commercial fault lines between cordiality and aloofness ... From such nerve endings are the making of humour, sadness, wisdom and joy' Observer 
 
'Narayan, the creator of the imaginary small town of Malgudi, is undoubtedly the most brilliant exponent of the fiction, as well as the friction, of intimacy ... Anthony Burgess has compared him to Chekhov.One might also compare him with those other masters of small worlds, John McGahern and Isaac Singer.That there is argument over his literary allegiances is proof of the universality of his intelligent charm' Sunday Times 
 
'A storyteller of a high order ... It is as wise as it is funny' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Irresistibly readable' The Herald

The Grandmother's Tale

Laird Hunt

Meet Ottie Lee Henshaw. Quick of mind and pleasing to the eye, she navigates a stifling marriage, a lecherous boss, and on one day in the summer of 1920, an odyssey across the countryside to witness a dark and fearful celebration. 
 
Meet Calla Destry. A young black woman desperate to escape a place where the stench of violence hangs heavy in the air, and to find the lover who has promised her a new life. 
 
Two remarkable women on the move through an America riven by fear and hatred. Every road leads to the bedlam of Marvel. There are buses laid on and Klan members gathering. Lives will collide and be changed forever.

The Evening Road

Fatima Farheen Mirza

** The New York Times bestseller ** 
 
'To be taken hostage by Fatima Mirza’s heartrending and timely story is a gutting pleasure... She captures your mind and heart with an urgency that defies you to stop reading. I guarantee you will be different when you close the book' Sarah Jessica Parker 
 
'I loved this book' Anne Tyler 
 
'The depth of the storytelling and the beauty of the language makes this debut something to treasure' John Boyne 
 
An Indian–Muslim family is preparing for their eldest daughter's wedding. But as Hadia's marriage – one chosen of love, not tradition – gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds: can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away? 
 
A Place for Us tells the story of one family and all family life: of coming to terms with the choices we make, of reconciingly past and present and of how the smallest decisions can lead to the deepest betrayals.

A Place for Us

William Palmer

The locals call it 'The India House'. But they have little to do with the three women who live there: grandmother, mother and daughter. 
 
Old Mrs Covington dreams of India and the days of the Raj. Her daughter Evelyn watches obsessively over eighteen-year-old Julia. Julia's tutor, Mr Henry, has been instructed to keep her in a state of 'innocence'. Every day he censors the newspaper and reports a sanitised version to the family. 
 
But it is 1956 and Britain is changing. Mrs Covington may shut out the modern world, but she cannot prevent the arrival of her son Roland, and her handsome grandson, James. The fragile paradise the women have constructed is about to be changed forever.

The India House

Ian McEwan

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE 
 
A warm treat of a read for the cold winter nights. 
 
It is July 1962. Edward and Florence, young innocents married that morning, arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their private fears of the wedding night to come and, unbeknownst to them both, the events of the evening will haunt them for the rest of their lives. 
 
'McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us' Guardian

On Chesil Beach

Sunjeev Sahota

In 1929 young bride Mehar struggles with her family&rsquo;s expectations whilst seventy years later her great-grandson discovers what her story can teach him about his own path. 
 
'A gorgeous, gripping read' Kamila Shamsie 
'A multi-generational masterpiece' Daily Mail 
 
Mehar, a young bride in rural Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. It is 1929, and she and her sisters-in-law - married to three brothers in a single ceremony - spend their days hard at work on the family farm, sequestered from contact with the men. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk. 
 
Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home? 
 
Readers love China Room 
***** 'I didn't want it to end' 
***** 'What. A. Book.' 
***** 'Beautifully crafted...a story as old as time' 
***** 'A novel of thwarted loves' 
 
Shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize 
 
'Amazing storytelling...gripping and very moving' BBC Radio 4, Open Book 
 
'I'm blown away by it' Tessa Hadley 
 
'Moving...fresh and nourishing' The Times

China Room

Tim Parks

For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water. 
 
Just days after controversial anthropologist Albert James writes these elusive lines to his son John, he is dead. Abandoning his girlfriend in London, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning. But the nature of his father's research and the circumstances of his death are far from clear and, on top of this, John must confront his mother's coolness, and the strangeness of the cremation ceremony that she has organised for his father. 
 
No sooner is the body consigned to the flames than a journalist arrives, determined to write a biography of the dead man, and though his mother will have nothing to do with the project, she cannot keep away from the journalist.

Dreams of Rivers and Seas

Sarah Bakewell

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? 
 
This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. 
 
This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.

How to Live

A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

Zareer Masani

Thomas Macaulay always inspired both admiration and hostility. He introduced English education to India, creating a class of westernised Indians often reviled as ‘Macaulay’s children’, but today many former ‘Untouchables’ literally worship him as their liberator from caste tyranny. 
 
This biography gives a vivid insight into one of the towering intellects of Victorian Britain: a brilliant, complex, self-made man, who rose from middle-class origins to the highest circles of the world’s largest empire. We follow his meteoric journey from child prodigy to Whig parliamentary orator, then imperial administrator and liberal reformer in India, and later Cabinet minister, revered elder statesman and famed historian back in Britain. 
 
Zareer Masani reclaims Macaulay as a pioneer of globalisation based on the English language and Western values. A strong advocate of liberal interventionism across the globe, he was the ideological precursor of today's Western military interventions in the world’s trouble-spots.

Macaulay

Britain’s Liberal Imperialist

Nirpal Dhaliwal Singh

Bhupinder 'Puppy' Singh Johal - handsome, rakish and spiritually disenfranchised - has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. Sexually ambitious, he is intent on living life to the full, regardless of the consequences. 
 
When sloaney rich-girl Sophie, falls for him, he grabs the chance to escape his past and pursue the woman of his dreams, the voluptuous sophisticate Sarupa, who happens to be engaged to Sophie's cousin. Using whatever and whoever he can, Puppy explores the grit and glamour of a city seething with the possibilities and politics of money, race and sex: an incendiary cocktail that explodes, changing him and those closest to him forever...

Tourism

Shyam Selvadurai

'An extraordinarily powerful, deeply moving novel' Amitav Ghosh 
 
NOW A MAJOR FILM ON NETFLIX 
 
In the world of his large family - affluent Tamils living in Colombo - Arjie is an oddity, a 'funny boy' who prefers dressing as a girl to playing cricket with his brother. 
 
But as Arjie comes to terms with his own homo-sexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives, Sri Lanka is plunged into civil war as fighting between the army and the Tamil Tigers gradually begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. 
 
Written in clear, simple prose, Shyam Selvadurai's first novel is masterly in its mingling of the personal and political. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEEL MUKHERJEE

Funny Boy

A Novel in Six Stories

Desmond Barry

Dr Christina Devenish, Suffragist and Theosophist, is running a birth control clinic in Bombay in 1931. When the clinic is burnt down in an independence riot, her father invites her to visit him in Bhutan, where he is an advisor at the court of the Shabdrung, Bhutan's version of the Dalai Lama. 
 
Arriving in Calcutta, Christina joins a British expedition to Bhutan led by Major Owen Davies, a tough Political Officer. Davies has the covert brief to resolve, even by 'drastic action', the rivalry between the Shabdrung and the Maharaja, Bhutan's temporal ruler. Christina's father is deeply embroiled in the Great Game: and for Davies, he's on the wrong side. 
 
As Christina and Owen Davies journey toward the Himalayas, they begin a hungry love affair, knowing that other loyalties will soon intrude; and when Christina meets the Shabdrung, the young god-king's effect on her leads to a devastating final act.

Cressida's Bed

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Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

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