As if reworking Shakespeare’s King Lear weren’t enough of a challenge, author Preti Taneja also tasks herself with turning the epic power-struggle into a call to arms for social change. Set between the murky corporate world of New Delhi and its interests in Srinagar, Kashmir, We That are Young is both a criticism of today’s consumer culture and an appeal to those who will inherit it.
Author: Jane Wallace
Clearly targeting a female audience, this epic of love and sedition nevertheless offers far more than the average chick-lit romance with its carefully investigated and balanced view of the struggle for Indian independence in the years before and during World War II.
What better subject for satire than new money and those spending it? The wealthy suburbs of Delhi provide rich pickings for Diksha Basu who sets her tale of social jockeying amid its denizens.
Baghdad is not a city readily associated with Christianity. Nevertheless, a small (and shrinking) community lives there. This brief but resonant novel describes the discrimination and abuse they suffer for their faith as well as offering an important insight into how intolerance (of any religion or lifestyle, not just Christianity) can escalate into violence and even war.
At first glance, this award-winning epic is off-putting. First published in Hindi in 1979, the new English translation is some 452 pages long without the maps, glossary or translator’s notes required to read it. Perseverance, however, yields rewards in the shape of an all-encompassing sweep through pre-partition India, its many-faceted society and richly hued landscapes.
The opening of Manju Kapur’s new novel Brothers is also its dénoument. With the outcome already known, author Kapur has to work doubly hard to keep the reader engaged in the working out of the plot—something she fortunately achieves with aplomb.
Despite being set in Zamana, a fictional city in contemporary Pakistan, this novel is no fantasy. Its depiction of religious intolerance is quite the opposite—all too depressingly real. Yet author Nadeem Aslam shines hope into nightmare with the notion that love (and books) could, one day, conquer all.
Mud, blood and other body fluids: this novel takes no prisoners in its portrayal of prostitution in today’s Mumbai. Yet against this sometimes upsetting backdrop, author Anosh Irani presents a compelling tale of dignity and sacrifice.
The title refers to Kinjal, a ten-year old girl who has been trafficked from her village in Pakistan. She is kept in a cage in the attic of a brothel to prepare her for “opening”. The story, however, focuses more on her keeper, an aging eunuch called Madhu.
A novel with a title like Pyre is unlikely to have a happy ending. Nevertheless, the journey towards this inevitable outcome delivers a disturbing insight into human bigotry and brutality whose application extends far beyond the novel’s treatment of inter-caste marriage in contemporary Tamil Nadu.
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