There are two very worst ways to arrive at The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The first is starting the journey by thinking it to be another English Butler story. Coloured by Reginald Jeeves, Nestor, or Cadbury - one would expect stiff-upper-lip-hilarity at every turn of the page. The second is reading it [...]

Mystic River, the brilliant and award-winning contemporary crime fiction novel by Dennis Lehane, is the tale of three Boston buddies whose lives took divergent courses after one fateful day when they were kids. Now, twenty-five years later, another deeply tragic event, have not just brought them together, but has also set them off on a collision course from which no one can hope to escape unscathed.

Kaalbela is an acclaimed and an award-winning Bengali novel by Samaresh Majumdar. Set in Calcutta during the turbulent 1970’s, while on one hand it tracks the birth of the Naxalism – a far-Left urban guerrilla movement, through its protagonist Animesh Mitra, on the other it is a deeply personal tale of love and camaraderie during the times of revolution.

Cormac McCarthy’s tale of a post-apocalyptic America opens on a road where a father and his son trudge along pushing a shopping trolley filled with their earthly belongings in a world all but destroyed, where the dying land is burnt black, forests defoliated and ashened, the sky perpetually gray. It is always cold, dark, damp and gloomy. There is nothing beautiful about the rain falling in this story because it only adds to the prevailing sense of sorrow that weighs heavier and heavier as the story unravels. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.

The Reader by German judge and law professor Bernhard Schlink was published in German in 1995 and translated into English in 1997. In 1999 it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, not to mention garnering various other literary awards. One can read this book as a story of a love affair set in post-war Germany between a 15 year old boy and a woman twice his age. Or one can read it and see the tale as something deeper than mere romance. I prefer the latter angle of understanding and that was how I approached the book.

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino is a scathing, relentless and ugly exposure of these darkest places in the human psyche. It is not a book for the weak of heart or stomach. It is not a pretty book. (Its name ought to be a big hint.) But if you are possessed of a macabre interest in those shadowy corners lurking inside you and your fellowmen, and are willing to sink to the deep, despairing depths this tome takes you down to, then allow me to tie the first stone around your ankle and throw you in. Grotesque tells the tale of three women…

Arundhati Roy, who is born to a Keralite Syrian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, has her partly autobiographical novel centering on the very themes that she grew up witnessing as a child – there are the Syrian Christian ideals, there’s the Indian caste system, there’s the democracy rule verses communalism, and there are the western and eastern ethics in clash – all in function within the vicinity of a classical Keralite family. The God of Small Things, Roy’s first and only book as of 2009 is written in prose that sets her apart from most iconic writers.

If you’re an Indian, there are few revelations in The White Tiger that come as a surprise to you – remnants of a feudal system, the corruption, the politics, the desperation of the poor, life in a big city, et al. But it’s not in these small details that we find a story worthy of, let’s say the Booker Prize. The evolution of human nature, the psychological metamorphosis of an individual, the transcendental aspirations of an ambitious entrepreneur who is desperate to break the cages of servitude and escape into the “light”…

Adichie’s Half of a yellow Sun is a story about war, and of love. Chidamamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote her second novel based on the Igbo people at the time of the Nigerian-Biafran war. Half of A Yellow Sun won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction in Britain and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A humanity in print, the book is treasured wealth for the absent country; a precious inheritance of the deceased nation and its departed generation. The book starts with the early 1960’s at a reasonably peaceful time…

The gift of genius often accompanies the curse of aberrance (Van Gogh, Einstein, Mozart are great examples) – for the lack of a subtler word. Sometimes insensitivity is a by-product of ignorance, but that’s something that can be emasculated with the knowledge of the intricate conundrum that we somehow never try to solve. Abnormalities like [...]