Morrison scrutinizes the terrifying physical and emotional trauma that slavery unleashes, to make undoubtedly what we can call her best work to date – Beloved. The novel was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner, who was infamously known for killing her own daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery. As the novel opens, we see the entrance of Paul D, a fellow slave who begins to live with Sethe in her household Bluestone 124. A stunner from the Nobel Prize winner..

In Sebastian Barry’s 2008 Booker Shortlist, The Secret Scripture, Barry is engrossed in Ireland’s most chaotic time - when the First World War, the 1916 rebellion, the 1920s War of Independence and Irish Civil War smoked through the skies of the old country. Here we find Roseanne McNulty, an ancient woman stepping close to her 100th birthday. In a mental hospital of Roscommon County, this Roseanne, old and very much enchanting secretly puts down on paper the days of her that were spent in the small town of Sligo…

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…

For The Cleft, Lessing was inspired by a scientific report claiming that women were the first human species, and that men came along much later. In a story where she depicts our early ancestors, she draws a lazy picture of the first females, the “Clefts” who idle around the seashore, swim through the waves and loll about the rocks living languid days doing nothing. Their lives are perfectly harmonious, until the day the boy children began to be born. Doris Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Big Sleep, along with books like Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, and Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, is considered a cornerstone where hard-boiled fiction is concerned. It is famous for its labyrinthine and deliciously convoluted plot, filled with complex character study. The befuddling and cynically laden narrative, which twists and turns like a serpent on marijuana, however, is just one of the numerous facets that have given this book such iconic status and high literary importance. It is a brilliant take on the dark underbelly of 1940’s L.A.

When remorse becomes the fatal venom that rushes through our veins, slowly and silently killing our conscience, shrinking the skeleton of our souls- seeking redemption through goodness remains the only way to recovery. Khaled Hosseini pens his first novel with poignant strokes of brotherly bonding, unconditional love, agonizing betrayal, ingrained guilt and final redemption.

“There is a way to be good again” were the words that offered Amir, the protagonist of this novel his one chance to atone for his penitent past, to recover from the truth of his childhood culpability, to deliver him from the heavy shadows of life-long guilt, into a glint of light and liberation.

Love is not merely blind; it is also deaf to the susurrating ticks of the clocks of time. If it weren’t, how could a 90 year old man, a river meandering through the delta of life, ready to merge with the sea of death, find himself head-over-heels in love with a girl, who’s young enough [...]

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 [...]

Choker Bali meaning Grain of Sand, Tagore’s marvelous work is the quintessence of love and everything that is wrapped around its intricate enfold. Simple love, tempestuous desire, impatient longing, and agitating seduction are only some of the strokes that Tagore’s masterly brush paints within this brilliant book, within our tender hearts.
The protagonist of [...]