Books & More

FOLKLORE
Kalila And DimnaRamsay
WoodRandom House
282 pages
Rs225
This is the first part of a retelling of the Panchatantra. King Dabschelim, ruler of India, was an insomniac and so took to astronomy as a hobby. The night that he sees a shooting star, he has a vision. Soon after, a hermit gives him a letter from a long-dead king addressed to King Dabschelim. Intrigued, the king seeks the advice of the wisest man in his kingdom Dr Bidpai, who tells him the story of Kalila and Dimna. The book features evocative illustrations.
NOVEL
Perfect EightReema Moudgil
Tranquebar
252 pages
Rs200 This novel takes you from Lahore to Kanpur to Patiala to Ambrosa to Bangalore and an Assamese cantonment. As Ira moves from one place to another, she is plagued by a sense of displacement. From her mother, who hasn’t recovered from the trauma of Partition, she “learnt to smell grief before it struck, to turn foreboding into a fine-tuned instrument”. Ira’s only sanctuary is a tea estate in Annaville, where she first met Samir, her childhood crush.

Sinking, Not Swimming
Nalini Rajan
Penguin
255 pages
Rs299 Three generations of a family gather for Cheenu’s last rites. Besides mourning and remembrance, it also becomes an occasion for secrets and grievances to surface. Suri, the joyless patriarch remembers how he admired and envied his brother Cheenu. Ravi, Cheenu’s laid-back doctor nephew, can’t understand the family's obsession with making money. Paru, Cheenu's salacious sister-in-law seeks pleasure in the arms of her lecherous relative Suresh. Told through a montage of voices, Sinking is an exploration of a world driven by power, money and success.
THRILLER
The Lucifer Code
Charles Brokaw
Penguin
517 pages
Rs299 Harvard professor and scholar of ancient languages Dr Thomas Lourds goes to Turkey to examine artefacts, but gets kidnapped before he lands. His kidnappers want him to translate writings that will lead them to a scroll authored by the man who wrote the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The scroll holds the key to the most unholy secret known to man. Those searching for the scroll — even one with links to the White House — will stop at nothing to get it.

The Chosen One
Sam Bourne
Harper
438 pages
Rs250 Maggie Costello, member of the US President’s National Security Council and Foreign Policy Advisor, is excited to be finally working for a leader she can believe in. President Stephen Baker has promised America ‘change’, ‘hope’ and a better future. When a man named Vic Forbes, who reveals scandal after scandal about the new President, is found dead, Maggie starts probing. Did the too-good-to-be-true president have anything to do with Vic’s murder? On the trail of truth, Maggie uncovers a conspiracy that reaches the heart of the US establishment.
Self-help
How To Be Your Own Management Guru
Morgen Witzel
Penguin
212 pages
Rs299 How smart a manager are you? How good are you at leveraging your skills in order to provide value for your customers? These are the kinds of questions every thinking manager asks him/herself. The author believes “the companies that survive are the ones that are managed well”. He attempts to delve into the mind of a manager and with a quiz at the end of each chapter, attempts to help managers re-evaluate their skills with respect to the requirements of the firm and the world.
Body Talk
Anjali Wason
Harper
256 pages
Rs199 From how to measure your breasts for the correct bra size, to if it’s okay to masturbate; whether lying to your parents about your boyfriend amounts to ‘cheating them’, to regrets after sex; from how to deal with a cheating boyfriend, to faking an orgasm; from how do you know if you’re gay, to how to build self-esteem; from whether mariiage is necessary, to what to do if you’ve been raped, Anjali Wason attempts to answer questions that young women asked her when she was editor of a magazine — questions that most girls feel afraid or embarrassed to ask their parents.
Fiction
House Rules
Jodi Picoult
Hodder & Stoughton
532 pages
Rs595 Parenting is not without its share of drama, and no author captures this with as much commercial success as Jodi Picoult. Her long list of bestsellers reads like a rainbow of hot-button parenting dilemmas. From shop-lifting to date-rape to school shoot-outs, she goes where no mom wants to go, and brings a kaleidoscope of perspectives on any tragic circumstance.
The Flaws In The Jewel
Roderick Mathews
HarperCollins
312 pages
Rs350 The book re-examines the British rule in India by concentrating on three central themes: its ability to defray the costs of its own maintenance; its impersonal and institutional qualities that gave it continuity and tenacity; and its self-proclaimed commitment to so-called higher purposes: the ‘upliftment’ of the condition of the ‘natives’ and the playing out of the ‘superior moral character’ of the Englishman. This volume seeks to show how the British Raj was never able to overcome, or even acknowledge, its many deficiencies.
Poetry
The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems
Agha Shahid Ali
Penguin
393 pages
Rs350 They ask me to tell them what Shahid means — Listen: It means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic Inhabiting the spaces between such dualities came naturally to Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet whose work effortlessly bridged the language and landscapes of the East and the West, and fused the symbols of his childhood with the cultural markers of his adopted homeland.