Hotel Arcadia, Sunny Singh (Oneworld/Magpie, March 2024)
Hotel Arcadia, Sunny Singh (Oneworld/Magpie, March 2024)

First paperback publication for the acclaimed international thriller by Sunny Singh: A terrorist siege in a luxury hotel. Among the survivors … Sam: a war photographer, famous for her haunting pictures of the dead. Abhi: the hotel manager, desperate to keep the guests safe. He never wanted to be a hero; he just wants to avoid disappointing his father and brother any more than he has already.

Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State, Orsola Casagrande (ed) and Mustafa Mustafa Gündoğdu (Comma, November 2023)
Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State, Orsola Casagrande (ed) and Mustafa Mustafa Gündoğdu (Comma, November 2023)

Kurdistan + 100 poses a question to contemporary Kurdish writers: Might the Kurds one day have a country to call their own? With 13 stories all set in the year 2046—exactly a century after the first glimmer of Kurdish independence, the short-lived Republic of Mahabad—this book offers a space for new expressions and new possibilities in the ongoing struggle for self-determination.

South of the Yangtze, Flora Qian (Proverse, November 2023)
South of the Yangtze, Flora Qian (Proverse, November 2023)

South of the Yangtze starts with the protagonist, Qian Yinan, taking the high-speed train through the landscape of Jiangnan (“South of the Yangtze River”) with her American husband. Now in her mid-thirties, Yinan recalls her first trip along the same route in the late 1980s, as well as her Shanghai childhood with her “historical counter-revolutionary” grandfather, semi-literate grandmother, philosophy professor father and former “red guard” mother.

When the Kurinji Blooms, Rajam Krishnan, Uma Narayanan (trans), Prema Seetharam (trens) (Orient BlackSwan, September 2023)
When the Kurinji Blooms, Rajam Krishnan, Uma Narayanan (trans), Prema Seetharam (trans) (Orient BlackSwan, September 2023)

Kurinjithen, literally honey of the kurinji flower, is a timeless poem in prose that transports you to the lush Nilgiris where this beautiful blue flower grows wild and to the land of the Badagas who inhabit these hills. It is also Rajam Krishnan’s eulogy to a vanished world and way of life. Once in twelve years when the kurinji blooms in these hills, bees store the honey of the kurinji in combs in rock crevices and on branches of trees. When the Kurinji Blooms narrates the family saga of three generations of Badagas who have for long remained untouched by modernity. Then, as the winds of commerce and change invade their tranquil and sheltered lives, innocence and harmony are replaced by conflict and tragedy that herald new beginnings.

The Man Who Walked Backwards and Other Stories, S Ramakrishnan, Prabha Sridevan (trans), (Orient BlackSwan, July 2023)
The Man Who Walked Backwards and Other Stories, S Ramakrishnan, Prabha Sridevan (trans), (Orient BlackSwan, July 2023)

The Man Who Walked Backwards and Other Stories is an anthology of eighteen short stories by S Ramakrishnan, the popular and critically acclaimed master of modern Tamil writing. The stories in this collection are a celebration of eccentricities: they feature characters who defy conventions, and who listen to their inner selves instead of conforming to familial and societal norms.