Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 576 pages. William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire is a chronicle of greed, ambition, and the machinations that put a vast geographical territory under the East India Company (EIC). The book’s epigraph offers a succinct summary of the book’s central theme: “Corporations …
Continue reading The Anarchy—The Relentless Rise of the East India Company: William Dalrymple
Published by Fourth Estate India / Penguin, 2019, 240 pages. Note: This book was published as Girl in White Cotton in India and under the title of Burnt Sugar elsewhere. Caregiving in the best of circumstances is a fraught business. One that is made more so when it involves a relationship that is itself threadbare, …
Continue reading Girl in White Cotton/Burnt Sugar: Avni Doshi
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash The year 2020 is coming to a close, finally. And what a year it has been! For weeks on end we stayed confined to our homes, unable to lead normal lives, listening to grim news of the pandemic. But throughout all this, books have opened a door to other …
Published by Jonathan Cape, 2020, 272 pages. How do you cope with being the daughter of a famous actress? What does it mean to live with someone for whom performing is not just something she does on stage? Norah’s mother is Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish stage and screen actress. Katherine was a single mother, …
Review by Usha RamanPublished by Penguin / Anchor Books My first encounter with Ali Smith was a hardcover library book with an intriguing title: How to be Both. I raced through it, transfixed, by the ingenuity of form and stop-in-your-tracks prose, the effortlessness with which she shifts perspective and forces you to see first through …
Continue reading Beyond the Seasons—Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLeanPublished by MacLehose Press / Riverhead Books, 2018, 508 pages. Original version published in 2015. "There are truths that don’t happen in those places, truths that nobody writes down because they’re invisible. There are millions of things that happen in special places… they are places that are not within the …
Continue reading The Shape of the Ruins: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Published by Lightning Books, 2021, 320 pages. “Memories? They’re the bits you feel and the bits you’re told, and they all come together in your mind as sound bytes and snapshots. Some you lose, and some become part of someone else’s memories. Some bits just disappear, and you end up looking for them for the …
Translated from German by Jane BillinghurstPublished by Greystone Books, 2016, 288 pages. Original version published in 2015. One day, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, stumbles across what he thinks are mossy stones but turn out to be old wood. But not just old wood, which would normally decompose, but the roots of a tree that no …
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 272 pages. “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the three Tides. This is something that happens once every eight years.” This is how the book begins. The narrator lives in a vast labyrinth of halls filled …
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Harvill Secker, 2009, 200 pages. Original version published in 2006. José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal. The village has a charter that dates back to the thirteenth century, “but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes …
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