All information sourced from publishers.
Ohari, KL Mohana Varma, translated from the Malayalam by Ministhy S
Kerala, the 1990s. Mini Balachandran is a homemaker. But with both her father and brother dead in an accident, she is left with no other choice but to come on board as the managing director of Dhanwantari Herbal Products Limited, their Kochi-based Ayurveda company. One day, out of the blue, covert attempts at a takeover are discovered. Dhanwantari’s shares are being bought at a furious pace; the players are unknown.
Tensions simmer. The company must be saved. A battle is at hand.
Winner of the 1993 Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, KL Mohana Varma’s Ohari is an epic, edge-of-the-seat tale about what it takes for the feisty Mini Balachandran to fight an aggressive takeover bid.
Mother Mine, Sheeba Shah
Priya. Breathtakingly beautiful, impetuous, ambitious. Her dream of becoming a movie star drives her to do the impossible: abandon an eight-year-old daughter, a good husband and a luxurious life in Kathmandu and follow Rohit, a film producer on the make, to Mumbai – a megacity where dreams bite the dust and harsh reality strikes swiftly. As Priya soon discovers, her life spirals downwards from broken promises, to sleazy casting couches and penury – plunging her into a world where only drugs and alcohol can see her through from one hazy dawn to the next.
Enter Medha, the daughter she abandoned 20 years ago, who tracks her down to her shambolic apartment in Goa, where she has started a “new life” – no longer an actress but a waitress, still an alcoholic. Medha sets out to save the mother whose love she craves – but struggles to keep afloat in the chaos in which she finds herself. Falling in love with the devastatingly handsome Pritesh and finding herself part of a bizarre triangle doesn’t help.
As the lives of mother and daughter coalesce, the story moves towards an inevitable yet inconceivable denouement.
The Binding, Salma, translated from the Tamil by Janani Kannan
In a small town in Tamil Nadu, Rasangam lives with his widowed mother and aunt, and siblings and cousins. Thrust prematurely into the shoes of the patriarch and keenly aware of the need to protect the family’s standing in their conservative society, Rasangam abandons his dreams of higher education.
When great misfortune befalls his beloved elder brother and then his younger sister, Rasangam is heartbroken. However, the foundations of their ties and resilience as a family run deep, nurtured by the meticulous yet overlooked care of the women. He turns to his faith – surrendering to the will of Allah, devoting himself to religious service and undertaking the Haj – which earns him the respect that had eluded him all his life. But history appears to repeat itself years later with Imran, Rasangam’s dutiful son, whose love is thwarted by political propaganda, throwing up questions about the reality of societal progress.
In this novel, author Salma grapples with the many forces that shape our lives: faith, family, tradition and the complicated bonds that link us to one another.
The Jasmine Murders, Roopa Unnikrishnan
When Uma moves to Manamadurai, a dismal backwater town, with her husband, Jayan, who has been posted there as the police chief, she is immediately uneasy. Despite its sleepy exterior, there have been undercurrents of communal tension and violence for years. Moreover, Jayan’s predecessor, ASP Manu, dubbed “a brute and a reprobate” by the locals, met a gruesome end, and the aftershocks persist.
Within days of their arrival, Uma’s worst fears come true. A man arrives at Uma and Jayan’s doorstep, holding the severed head of a woman, the jasmine in her braid intact. This is only the beginning of what turns out to be a long chain of grisly, interlinked events that threaten to destroy Manamadurai’s peace as well as the precarious marital bliss of Uma and Jayan. Meanwhile, there’s a theft at the local zamindar’s house, and a secret long buried by the family is threatening to surface. Uma soon finds herself at the heart of the mystery, as she becomes privy to a covert network of gossip and hearsay. And over this grim tableau, a severe cyclone is brewing.
As Jayan grapples with the ever-widening vortex of fear, suspicion, and criminal behaviour that the murder of the woman has set in motion, Uma joins forces with her husband and makes a startling discovery that breaks the case wide open and leads to the truth.
Maryam & Son, Mirza Waheed
Maryam Ali, a school chef and widow, finds her son’s bed empty one morning. At her sisters’ insistence, she reports him missing, hoping the police will bring him home. Instead, government officials arrive with news that her Dil might be far away from London and involved in something almost unimaginable.
As the days pass and the waiting gets more and more intolerable, despite the fierce support of her mother and sisters, Maryam retreats into the past, seeking answers for the present. Unexpectedly, she also finds herself forming a connection with Julian, the young family liaison officer assigned to her case – a bond complicated by his role in the machinery that watches her son.
While American bombs fall on Mosul, where she’s told her son is, Maryam must confront the ultimate question – how does one grieve the absence of a child one may never have truly known?
The Seventh Swar, Natasha Sharma
When an old woman is stabbed to death in her Mumbai apartment, ex-cop-turned-private-investigator Satyadarshi expects it to be a routine murder investigation. Well, as routine as murders ever get. But the deeper she digs, the more confounding the case appears.
Clues hidden in classical music, an innocuous-looking wall hanging she keeps seeing everywhere and a tattered old book that seems abuzz with secrets rooted in ancient Indian history. As she is vaulted back to King Ashoka’s times (yes, that Ashoka) by her unusual discoveries, she finds the threads of his legacy entangled with those of her own life in ways she is completely unprepared for.
As she chases leads through Mumbai’s humid chaos, Satyadarshi also has to fend off her mother’s relentless matchmaking, investigate an overweight So-Bo dog and deal with an almost-date whose nerdy facts and unexpectedly muscular chest make her heart race. Not to mention the growing pile of bodies further ensnaring her in a conspiracy that spans across centuries and threatens to upend everything she knows to be true about her family and herself.
