Rosarita, Anita Desai
Bonita, a young student from India, sits on a park bench in San Miguel, Mexico – where she has arrived to learn Spanish. She is alone in this place to which she has no connection. It feels like bliss.
And then a woman approaches her, claiming to recognize Bonita, because she is the spitting image of her mother who supposedly made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother did not paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, as the past threatens to flood the present, or, perhaps, even rewrite it.
Beggar’s Bedlam, Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Rijula Das
Marshall Bhodi Sarkar and his lieutenant Sarkhel surreptitiously dig on the banks of the Ganges River looking for crude oil reserves. Instead, they unearth curved daggers, rusty broadswords, and a Portuguese cannon. Bhodi is an occasional military man and the lead sorcerer of the secret black-magic sect named Choktar. He joins forces with the flying Flaperoos – men with a predilection for alcohol and petty vandalism – to declare outright war against the Marxist–Leninist West Bengal government. In a bloodless revolution that is fascinating in its utter implausibility, a motley crew of yet more implausible characters come together in a magic-realist fictional remapping of Calcutta.
On the Other Side, Rahman Abbas, translated from the Urdu by Riyaz Latif
Abdus-Salam Kalshekar’s only aspiration was to publish his Dastan-e-Ishq, a seven-volume “Saga of Passion”, before his death. While Salam could only complete three volumes, an author sets out to write a novel about Salam, unveiling the fifty-three diaries about the latter’s past amours that consume the saga. It also reveals a certain beloved whom Salam could never bring himself to write about. While Salam's life unfolds a world that is riddled with patriarchy, caste prejudice, religious intolerance and exploitation in the name of faith, and the deeper conflicts of love and abandonment .
Noctural Pondicherry: Stories, Ari Gautier, translated from the French by Roopam Singh
A postman struggles to deliver the last letter on his last day of work. A prostitute elopes with the auto rickshaw driver who arranged clients for her. An inspector discovers the dead body of the boy he had an altercation with the previous evening.
In seven stories, Ari Gautier peels back the layers of human emotions until glimpses of greed, anger and lust can finally reveal themselves. Unsettling and irresistible, Nocturne Pondicherry is an all too realistic collection where mundane situations – featuring common people, ill-fated street dwellers and hapless immigrants – pull readers in and fling them into the abyss.
Inside Burn, Sanjay Bahadur
A young boy peddles pirated books; his sister, two infants by her side, offers wilted flowers to unwilling customers; an old ice-cream vendor looks forward to some extra earnings under the hot sun; at a cafe nearby, a bunch of students celebrates graduation; a group of mechanics prepares for afternoon prayers on the pavement; local shopkeepers play loud bhajans to announce a feast for the needy; a police van idles by the roadside; a young woman in a luxury car grows impatient with her clients and their demands; and traffic that has come to a standstill slowly begins to start up.
Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changes.
As the street descends into a vortex of vengeance and retribution, the unfolding events make victims and perpetrators, observers and participants, of them all.
Chikamma Tours Pvt Ltd, Unmana
29-year-old Nilima is a fat, grumpy, whiskey-drinking, book-obsessed lesbian, who has recently started working at Chikamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, a boutique tour agency in Bengaluru. One morning, after a disagreement with her intimidating and alluring boss Shwetha, Nilima storms out of the office and stumbles across a body.
The dead man is Jagat Desai, owner of Jagdeep Book House, who Nilima has vaguely interacted with in the past. She is drawn to this real-life murder mystery right in front of her and swings into action. She ropes in Shwetha and their young colleague Poorna to interview the employees of the bookshop and spy on suspects, all in a bid to solve the crime.
But real-life murder investigations are much trickier than the ones in crime novels and much less glamorous. Can Nilima stick with the case, even when things get tough? Will the Chikammas uncover the culprit and solve this seemingly senseless murder?
