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.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The epigraph of Things Fall Apart quotes the above four lines from Yeats’ poem. While the original lines of Yeats’ poem continue with blasphemous details of his own era – full [...]

This story is about many things. It is about a miscarriage of justice. It is about relationships. It is about a crime mystery. It is about what society expects of us. It is about national identity. And, yes, it is about two people named Arthur and George. At its core, however, it is about judgement. [...]

As you gaze at the cover of the book, you see a pair of eyes - intense, disjointed eyes that allude at a conflict of perspectives or emotions within an individual. Perspectives on love-and-hate-relationship with a country, on obsessive love, identity and belonging, and on perceived social standing. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, that individual is Changez. - The brilliant boy from Lahore, who manages to get into Princeton with a generous scholarship. On a pleasant day in Lahore, Pakistan, a bearded “[ex]lover of America” reveals to a fearful American stranger his love affair..

Ralph Ellison always insisted that his classic protest novel Invisible Man was neither a protest novel nor autobiographical. Still, it’s difficult to miss the parallels of the narrator’s and Ellison’s lives, and it’s even more difficult to miss that Invisible Man is clearly a protest novel. The question isn’t whether the book is a protest, rather; it’s what the book is protesting. The story’s narrator, who is never referred to by name, is a young man that begins by telling us his story from his subterranean home. Originally from the South…

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.

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…

On the Road is considered the greatest book of the Beat movement and Jack Kerouac its unofficial spokesperson. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free is timeless. Through its fascinating depictions of friendship, experiences on the road and the longing for ‘It’ – an expression that could signify anything from frenzy and exhilaration to salvation and bliss, the novel was way ahead of its time. The enormous impact of the book is as relevant today as it was groundbreaking then. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free…

Wouldn’t we feel elated to know that all those dreamy knights and heavenly princesses, eternal lovers and magical soul mates were true and alive? That a life of love filled with adventure, pureness, and celebration can still be found? The Bridge across Forever is that flash of hope for those fierce romantics who’d always want to believe that there is such a thing as perfection in life and love, for those who trust that the capacity for divine joy and completeness in love can be found. Famed writer Richard Bach’s true life is one such beautiful autobiographical..