Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
James McBride
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Rs.799
Set in 1972, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where immigrant Jews and African Americans live cheek by jowl, the novel lays bare the lives of people who exist on the margins of white, Christian America. But the story is not all bleakness: love and community sustain the people, helping them defy the town’s white establishment.
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The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Mantle
Rs.550
The father-daughter team running Kamogawa Diner in Tokyo not only rustles up extraordinary dishes but also styles themselves as “food detectives”, who are capable of recreating a dish from their customers’ memory to unlock their past. A bestseller in Japan, this feel-good novel is a celebration of food and good company.
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The Forgotten Wife: The Story of Hidimbi and Bheem
Madhavi Mahadevan
Speaking Tiger
Rs.399
The latest in the retelling of stories from the epics, this is the tale of Bheem; his wife for just a year, the demoness Hidimbi; and their son, Ghatotkach, who is fated to become cannon fodder in the great war of Kurukshetra. Madhavi Mahadevan foregrounds women’s desire and their unjust treatment in the hands of patriarchy.
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Gentle Resistance: The Autobiography of Chandi Prasad Bhatt
Translated by Samir Banerjee
Permanent Black
Rs.895
Gentle Resistance narrates the extraordinary life of the Gandhian environmentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt who turned to full-time social work after hearing the Sarvodaya messages of Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan. It also gives us a glimpse into peasant life in India’s forested mountains where demanding weather conditions, a fragile ecology, and lack of opportunity blend into an ecosystem being changed now by consumerism and modernity.
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Lest We Forget: How three sisters braved the Partition
Indira Varma
Westland Books
Rs.599
Indira Varma, who was six when she first heard of the impending partition of India, recounts her family’s years as homeless refugees in India, her life shuttling between cities and towns until she finally settled in Delhi, and her journey to building a successful business in travel.
This is the story of one life upturned by the Partition, but it is also an ode to the power of love and that thing called hope. It is, ultimately, both a record of, and a guide to, a life well lived.
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Monsoon Economy: The Price of Conquering Nature
Tirthankar Roy
Penguin Business
Rs.399
In the monsoon regions of South Asia, the rainy season sustains life but brings with it the threat of floods, followed by a long stretch when little gainful work is possible and the looming threat of famine. Tirthankar Roy explores the interaction between the environment and the economy in the emergence of modern India, and especially how the tropical monsoon climate makes economic and population growth contingent on water security
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Fiction
The Colony of Shadows
Bikram Sharma
Hachette India
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The Vaster Wilds
Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books
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Normal Rules Don’t Apply: Stories
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday
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What You Need to Be Warm
Neil Gaiman
Bloomsbury Publishing
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Non-fiction
Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
Gary J. Bass
Knopf
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Plural Feminisms: Navigating Resistance as Everyday Praxis
Edited by Sohini Chatterjee and Po-Han Lee
Bloomsbury Academic
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The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
Courtney Thorsson
Columbia University Press
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Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets
Jeff Horwitz
Doubleday
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