Before it even came out, Narcopolis was hailed as the successor to De Quincey and Burroughs, a new opium fuelled haze set in the mean streets of Bombay of the 70’s. The poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel undoubtedly informed with that sensitive use of language that has characterized his poetry. So much is certainly true. The language takes you by the imagination and leads you through the pages like the slow drift of smoke. There is an ‘I’ narrator, Dom Ullis, who like Thayil hails from the South, who escapes after an unfortunate incident in New York to find Shuklaji Street and Rashid’s opium den in Bombay. He discovers piyalis of opium expertly served by the eunuch Dimple who engages with him in intellectual discussion. And when he’s on his flights of opium fantasy, Dom’s language of choice is English.

Jeet Thayil

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This is a story which strengthens the belief that truth is stranger than fiction. Browsing the New York library archives ‘on the prowl’ for a subject to write about, biographer Deborah Baker stumbled upon a file containing the papers of Maryam Jameelah. The sight of a lone Muslim name in those conservatively American stacks piqued Baker’s interest. She rummaged through the papers and came upon the intriguing story of Margaret Marcus, an intellectual misfit born to Jewish parents in New York State. Known as ‘Peggy’ the girl had no use for teen fashions or preoccupations like dating – instead she was obsessed from an early age with spirituality. “Even if there is a God, what sense did it make for Him to restrict His truth to a single people?” she wrote in a letter when she was eleven.

Deborah Baker

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This is a fairly unique romp through the afterlife with criminals, philosophers and spiritual leaders thrown in for good measure. The book begins with the death of Nyra Dubey, taser wielding vigilante, the feared Delhi Belle who stalks eve teasers in the night and appears out of nowhere to claim vengeance. However, death claims her, much to her annoyance and those in charge of the afterlife records are not quite sure whether she committed suicide or not. So she’s classified as ‘a Wednesday soul’ – souls in Pant’s fantastic world belong to days of the week with Sunday getting the highest ratings.

Nyra is annoyed, out for vengeance and still armed – to discover how her taser works out of the living world is a feat of entertaining gymnastics.

Sorabh Pant

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For someone with cross cultural roots – his mother is Sri Lankan-British and a Christian and his father a Gujarati Hindu – Ashok Banker has rediscovered himself as an explorer of the fantasy world of Indian mythology. He began as one of India’s first writers of thrillers in English, then moved on to science fiction and mythology, crossing new milestones with every book. Banker says that his interest in the epics was revived by the fact that while the world of literature and films and television and music was overflowing of references to Greek mythology and history, Roman Gods, western gods, Christian theology and names, Jewish names, there were very few references to Hindu gods or myths. Or if there were, they were garbled. He therefore decided to delve into Hindu mythology and found it all the more interesting because unlike Christianity, Hinduism did not exist as a single defined religion.

Ashok Banker

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This is a follow-up to the immensely popular first collection of South Indian, specifically Tamil pulp fiction, released in 2008. It features stories by names like Indra Soundar Rajan, Medhavi, Jeyaraj, Pushpa Thangadorai, Rajesh Kumar, Indumathi, M.K.Narayanan, and Resakee. The contents are very unashamedly pulp, gore, blood, violence with overtones of sex. All this is signaled by the kitschy cover of a pretty girl sipping from a skull with blood droplets trickling into her cleavage. In this case the book can certainly be judged by its cover.

The blurb advertises ‘7 THRILLING tales… from 7 Indian and Singaporean masters of ACTION, SUSPENSE, and HORROR!’ and the reader gets the full dose. There is a tale of a curse that hunts down the members of a family of debauched maharajahs who can only be saved by purity.

Pritham Chakravarthy

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Whatever Mamata Banerjee’s government brings to West Bengal she has found a place for herself in history as the woman who brought down the world’s longest serving communist government. Monobina Gupta’s biography is an incisive analysis of the factors that brought Didi – as Mamata Banerjee is fondly referred to by the world at large – to the forefront of power.

Monobina Gupta begins by describing the character of a woman who can be exasperating and magnetic by turns. She points out that Mamata hails from the lower middle classes and therefore is not a bhadralok as many of the top echelons of the CPI-M are.

Monobina Gupta

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‘It’s hard to figure out how to eat the dinner of your dreams, without letting the kilos climb. That’s why this book.’ – Shubhra Krishan

The book is attractive from the moment you see the bold cover. Inside you’ll find very personal pieces on eating and staying thin peppered with attractive illustrations and delivered in a chatty tone of voice. There are quite a few useful tips on cutting down on the portions that one eats, or serving soup with olive oil drizzled baked croutons rather than fried ones. Of course what she says – eat light at dinner – is not exactly a pathbreaking revelation, but it is delivered in a way guaranteed to appeal to today’s trendy young homemakers.

Shubhra Krishan

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A humid climate redolent of spices, sweat on dark skins – Sri Lanka conjures up many images which lend themselves well to erotica. And of course, erotic writing is far older than many forms and while being general attempts to address itself to the particular covering all kinds of imagined encounters – there is a wealth of erotica, both pornographic and otherwise in the Sinhala language ranging from the historic to the contemporary. What separates it from pornography is that it hints indirectly and so attempts a sensuous stirring of the senses through a kind of half revealing.

Ameena Hussein has put together this collection of short stories, the first of their kind from Sri Lanka, in an attempt she says in her introduction, to unveil the ‘spicy fantasies’ of the land to which she belongs and bring fresh voices to the attention of the English reading public

Ameena Hussein

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To paraphrase a quote from the Sharukh Khan film Don, ‘capturing the Don is not difficult, just impossible’. Oswald Pereira’s Newsroom Mafia explores a perennially fascinating terrain for fans of any kind of Mafia fiction. Pereira used to be a crime reporter in Mumbai before he retired, so he draws on his experiences to tell his story. Newsroom Mafia is the tale of the invincible Don Narayan Swamy and the struggle of ‘supercop’ Donald Fernandez to bring him to book. Narayan Swamy is based on the infamous godfather of Matunga Vardarajan Mudaliar and bears full testimony to the accuracy of the gangster films that crop up in Bollywood. Supporting him the Don has an entourage of journalists who run planted stories in exchange for lucrative remuneration and bottles of scotch.

Oswald Pereira

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The exploration of the unknown has fascinated writers since time immemorial, wanderings, encounters with a new culture and the induction into it. This has been seen in popular fiction as well as literary – the latter starting perhaps with Marco Polo, who was accused of manufacturing much of his information. What is also curious is that people have been fascinated by encounters between the west and the orient – one could number books like Lord Jim, Shogun, River of Smoke and most recently The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, the last two written by Indian authors. Amitabh Ghosh and Kunal Basu. In fact, the last two have hit the public gaze within a year of each other. Ghosh’s is specifically about the opium trade with China during Britain’s reign while Basu’s pinpoints the encounter of a Portuguese doctor with Chinese medicine. Specifically a son’s quest to find a remedy for syphilis, the plague that was for 400 years or more the world’s forerunner to AIDs and that was similarly regarded by society and the Church, and save his father, ironically a respected physician who is helpless in the face of the scourge.

Kunal Basu

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that self help books are the trend of the day because they encourage others to dream. Rashmi Bansal has put together a handy collection of the realized dreams of 20 social entrepreneurs to serve as examples for others to follow. The entrepreneurs are clubbed in 3 groups: “rainmakers”, “changemakers”, and “the spiritual capitalist”, with individual chapters which have admittedly intriguing titles like ‘The Girl in the Mirror’, “Soul Food’ and ‘Lead Kindly Light’, to mention a few.

Bansal takes Martin Luther King’s famous speech of August 1963 as the starting point for her book, though she is quick to point out that the people she has chosen ‘are …not Mother Teresa.

Rashmi Bansal

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