A small silver box lies buried in a garden in Rajkot. When a dachshund named Chotu digs it up, Ava recognises the object from a childhood she would rather leave undisturbed. She hides it again, but the box carries more than family memories. It is connected to a spirit tiger, an enchanted world beyond a…
Author Laleh Khadivi is best known for her “Kurdish Trilogy”—The Age of Orphans, The Walking and A Good Country—which explores the lives of three generations of migrant men and their experiences in the United States. The Iranian-Kurdish-American writer describes them as “books written in the voice of men about men’s worlds”. Her new novel, set…
Despite the steady stream of works of all genres now being translated into English, it can still take a long time for even the work of award-winning authors to show up in the West. Twenty years ago, novelist and playwright Yukiko Motoya’s novella, Love at Least, was published in Japan and was nominated for the…
The Yarsanis are a unique ethno-religious group centered in Kermanshah, in Iranian Kurdistan. With estimated adherents surpassing one million, this little-known syncretic religion dates from the 14th century and has elements reminiscent of Zoroanstrianism and other non-Islamic traditions, and is central to The Shadeless Border, Iranian Kurdish writer and folklorist Jiyar Jahan Fard’s first novel…
Parents are few and far between in Haruki Murakami novels. The Japanese author’s protagonists are adrift, often removed from their friends but nearly always removed from their families. This fictional alienation reflects a postwar dilution of collectivism in Japan as Murakami was growing up, not to mention a widening ideological gap between the wartime generation…
Usha and her husband Om are part of a Gujarati community in Coimbatore and the parents of three grown children: sons Ashmit and Romit and a daughter named Pari. Om is co-owner of a textile store and takes his role seriously as head of his household even though all three children have moved out. As…
Lebanese novelist and poet Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic literature, perhaps best known in English for Dear Mr Kawabata (1995) which addresses the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War. His most recently translated work, Paving the Sea (originally written in 2011), satirizes the aspiration for Western liberalism and nationalism,…
At the center of Kersi Khambatta’s Bombay Tabloid is Cyrus Kerman, the son of an Iran-born bakery owner, and his lifelong entanglement with Devika Wright, a beautiful Anglo-Indian dancer and model who later becomes a lawyer. Cyrus falls in love with her twice. Their story unfolds between two traumatic periods in the city’s history. The…
In This is Where the Serpent Lives, Daniyal Mueenuddin unpacks the nuances of the Pakistani landowning class through rich, in-depth characterisation filled with complex interpersonal dynamics that shed light on the realities of class, discrimination and social mobility. Divided into four sections, each with a different narrator, the novel explores the interconnected lives of characters…
Mitya New’s earlier career as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, China, and Europe and his present position at universities in Hong Kong and India were evidently good preparation for his debut novel, Beyond Mount Kailash, an engaging story of a cross-cultural marriage that takes a different path from the typical Asian expat story. Maria…