Worth reading from cover to cover, They Go to Sleep is interesting on a whole new level. There are a total of twelve short stories in this collection. It is a well-compiled assortment of tales about ordinary people going about their everyday lives until they fall into extraordinary situations and how they deal with these circumstances.
The Panchatheertha is a satirical revision of sections 1 and 2 of The Panchatantra written by Vishnu Sharma. What holds the plot together is the manner of storytelling that Rajiv Mittal aces to perfection. The story unfolds with a moderate pace and in a gradual, though not necessarily chronological, manner.
Life in the Sunshine claims to be an autobiography of an unknown cricketer. This unknown cricketer is Sat who breathes and lives every moment of his life for cricket. He is an uncanny follower of the game and shares a fervour for the sport with his friends.
Dedicated to her late father Shri Ram Das Chawla who has influenced her most with his rare and inimitable qualities, It’s Up To You is an inspiring read on the need for taking action in an age where protest and self-representation are at its peak.
A staunch believer in the miracles of prayer and God, Krishnamoorthi presents his autobiography from his birth to 2018 in this book – 75 Years: Reflections of my Life and the World around Me. Apart from being a researcher and able administrator, he was also a man of many talents.
I Want to Run Away is highly dramatic and Bollywoodised and the plot, on the whole, has a sense of a modern retelling of the Jab We Met story though it is not exactly the same. The language in I Want to Run Away is simple and easy to read with minimal spelling or grammatical errors.
A fast-paced noir murder mystery with dark humour that builds on the secrecies of the Mumbai underworld and an accidental hero, Living Hell is at times bafflingly exotic beyond words. Vivaan Shah has an eye for detail like none other.
Dedicated to the only one who truly fathoms the meaning of love, Tell Tale Pug Tail and Everything Else is written for Grey’s 8-year-old pug “Nuts.” The book is a collection of 40 written pieces most of which are poems. It is highly interesting in its format for the pieces don’t follow a fixed form.
Author Megha Ahuja believes in doing the right kind of research for every piece of writing that she commits herself to do. And that’s probably why you will find a lot of regional influences, cultural nuances, and detailed descriptions of places and things in her stories.
Light and humorous at the beginning, An Indian Loser is the tale of Pichku and his friend Mustang who are soon to appear for the Uttar Pradesh Board Examination. What follows through is a story of friendship and mutual bonding that is commemorated by the very knowledge of their togetherness.
Divided into three parts and 24 chapters, Vivek Gumaste’s V.Q.E is the tale of an Indian physician in the United Kingdom of the 1980s. V.Q.E is the abbreviated version of Visa Qualifying Exam that is a rigorous and challenging test that foreign medical graduates had to pass to gain entry to practice medicine in the United States in the 1980s.
Stand-by Love is a light read and can be read in a single sitting at a go. What holds together the work is the strength of characterisation. The plot has an up-and-down frame of flow as things take several sudden and unpredictable turns. It is a light read and can be read in a single sitting at a go.
Tales of Her is all about celebrating womanhood and its characteristics, the perfection, the sense of keeping everyone happy and the bounded dutifulness that lies at the core of being a woman in the modern world. 10 women battle it out in 10 compelling stories of desire, betrayal, faith and above all, the search for a perfection that is a never-ending quest.
Dedicated to everyone cruising along in this journey of life, The Sameness in a Consistent Change is a book on nostalgia and memory. At a stretch, The Sameness in a Consistent Change is a good 60-minutes-read but it can barely be read at a go. It takes time for the ideas to seep in.
Hate in the Time of Malaria is a collection of five screenplays that stands for the idea of inversion and apposition. Comedy is the basic strain that flows through these tales. The stories are built up to multiple climaxes and several twists in the narrative structure.
Isles of Mambo comes with a social message in each story like a moral that can be taken away from each of them. It is a collection of 12 short stories beginning with the story Twelve. While a reader may mistakenly think that the stories begin in a rather predictable fashion, they move into broader dimensions and cannot be easily guessed.
Forget Not to Laugh is an odd collection of 260 jokes mostly on Sardarjis all under 158 pages. Despite all the fun, Mallick comes with a noble cause. The book closely explains the scientific needs behind laughing on a daily basis. The author’s intention behind writing this collection is to make people aware of the scientific benefits of laughing.
3/3: A Trio-Ship by Mahidharnath Sesetti is the story of three friends and their struggles at college with exam pressure as a central theme. Other themes include striving for a stable job, aspiring for a government job, job security and gender bias and discrimination at the workplace.