Origami Aai
Manjiri Indurkar
Tranquebar
Rs.350
These poems are centred on Aai (Marathi for mother), who embodies the sense of home. She offers solace and protection from the vicissitudes of the indifferent world. Manjiri Indurkar’s poems have a vulnerability that lends them honesty.
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Kashmir
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar
HarperCollins India
Rs.499
The third book of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s The Partition Trilogy is set in Kashmir in the months leading up to Partition. In the confusion and ensuing upheaval regarding the princely state’s fate—whether it will accede to Pakistan or India—common people’s lives are upended. Then, barely two months into Independence, the first Indo-Pak war begins, leaving Kashmir in tatters.
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Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay; translated by Sucheta Dasgupta
Thornbird
Rs.595
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s delightfully witty tales about ghosts, ghouls and the common folk have entertained generations of Bengalis. The author was adept at combining folklores with snippets of modern life, all livened up with dark humour. Sucheta Dasgupta’s translation brings Mukhopadhyay’s zany tales to the rest of India.
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Remaking the Citizen for New Times: History, Pedagogy and the Amar Chitra Katha
Deepa Sreenivas
Seagull Books
Rs. 299
How did Amar Chitra Katha, the widely read comic series that was started in 1967, influence the historical and national consciousness of young Indian readers? Deepa Sreenivas shows us how these mythological-political tales emphasised the instructive rather than the informative potential of history, even as they ignored caste and class as systemic issues.
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Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India
James Staples
Harpercollins India
Rs. 399
James Staples’ ethnographic research on food practices in South India, which includes interactions with cattle owners, brokers, butchers, and cooks, attempts to understand why eating beef is at once a violation of sacred taboos and an expression of marginalised identities, and how bovine politics exposes fault lines within society in an age overrun by Hindu fundamentalism.
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The Grammar of My Body: A Memoir
Abhishek Anicca
Penguin
Rs.499
Abhishek Anicca, who identifies as a person with locomotor disability and chronic illness, writes wryly about living with the condition and navigating desire as a queer-disabled man in this eloquent memoir-in-essays.
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Fiction
Haifa Fragments
Khulud Khamis
New Internationalist Publications Limited
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Black Butterflies
Priscilla Morris
Duckworth
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The Mountain in the Sea
Ray Nayler
Picador
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The Stellar Debut of Galactica MacFee: The New 44 Scotland Street Novel
Alexander McCall Smith
Polygon
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Non-fiction
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times
Wolfram Eilenberger
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Penguin Random House
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China, Russia, and the USA in the Middle East: The Contest for Supremacy
Edited by Benjamin Houghton and Kasia A. Houghton
Routledge
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Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health
J. C. Hallman
Henry Holt
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Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post
Martin Baron
Flatiron
COMMents
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