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The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz
by Rohinton Mistry

ISBN 037570342X (0-375-70342-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Set during the 1990s in an overcrowded and politically corrupt Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters depicts a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Expertly interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences ("no matter where you go in the world, there is only one story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different").
Family Matters is a compelling, emotional, and persuasive testimony to the importance of memories in every family's history. In a poetic style rich with detail, Mistry creates a world where fate dances with free will, and the results are often more familiar than anyone would ever care to admit. --Gisele Toueg [via]
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Arranged Marriage
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN 0385483503 (0-385-48350-3)
Softcover, Anchor Books

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Although Chitra Divakaruni's poetry has won praise and awards for many years, it is her "luminous, exquisitely crafted prose" (Ms.) that is quickly making her one of the brightest rising stars in the changing face of American literature. Arranged Marriage, her first collection of stories, spent five weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list and garnered critical acclaim that would have been extraordinary for even a more established author.For the young girls and women brought to life in these stories, the possibility of change, of starting anew, is both as terrifying and filled with promise as the ocean that separates them from their homes in India. From the story of a young bride whose fairy-tale vision of California is shattered when her husband is murdered and she must face the future on her own, to a proud middle-aged divorced woman determined to succeed in San Francisco, Divakaruni's award-winning poetry fuses here with prose for the first time to create eleven devastating portraits of women on the verge of an unforgettable transformation. [via]
More editions of Arranged Marriage:
- Arranged Marriage : Stories: ISBN 0385475586 (0-385-47558-6)
  Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
- Arranged Marriage: ISBN 0385483503 (0-385-48350-3)
  Softcover, Anchor Books
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Brick Lane
by Monica Ali

ISBN 0743243315 (0-7432-4331-5)
Softcover, Scribner

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Book summary:
With its gritty Tower Hamlets setting, this sharply observed contemporary novel about the life of an Asian immigrant girl deals cogently with issues of love, cultural difference and the human spirit. The pre-publicity hype about Brick Lane was precisely the kind to set alarm bells ringing (we've heard it so often before), but, for once, the excitement is fully justified: Monica Ali's debut novel demonstrates that there is a new voice in modern fiction to be reckoned with.
Nazneen is a teenager forced into an arranged marriage with a man considerably older than her--a man whose expectations of life are so low that misery seems to stretch ahead for her. Fearfully leaving the sultry oppression of her Bangladeshi village, Nazneen finds herself cloistered in a small flat in a high-rise block in the East End of London. Because she speaks no English, she is obliged to depend totally on her husband. But it becomes apparent that, of the two, she is the real survivor: more able to deal with the ways of the world, and a better judge of the vagaries of human behaviour. She makes friends with another Asian girl, Razia, who is the conduit to her understanding of the unsettling ways of her new homeland.
This is a novel of genuine insight, with the kind of characterisation that reminds the reader at every turn just what the novel form is capable of. Every character (Nazneen, her disappointed husband and her resourceful friend Razia) is drawn with the complexity that can really only be found in the novel these days. In some ways, the reader is given the same all-encompassing experience as in a Dickens novel: humour and tragedy rub shoulders in a narrative that inexorably grips the reader. Whether or not Monica Ali can follow up this achievement is a question for the future; it's enough to say right now that Brick Lane is an essential read for anyone interested in current British fiction. --Barry Forshaw [via]
More editions of Brick Lane:
- Brick Lane: ISBN 0743243307 (0-7432-4330-7)
  Hardcover, Scribner
- Brick Lane: ISBN 0743243315 (0-7432-4331-5)
  Softcover, Scribner
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The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri

ISBN 0393050424 (0-393-05042-4)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
The title of Manil Suri's first novel gets right to the point. His protagonist, having purchased the right to sleep on the ground-floor landing of a Bombay apartment house, slips slowly from a coma into death. As this aging alcoholic takes leave of the earth, his neighbors surround him, arguing over who gave Vishnu a few dried chapatis, who called the doctor for him, and who will pay for the ambulance to cart him away. Meanwhile, the hero of The Death of Vishnu is lost in memories. Drifting through increasingly vivid scenes from his past, he recalls his relatively rare snatches of love and joy--and especially his romance with Padmini, a self-involved prostitute. On one particular day, it seems, he stole one of his employer's cars and drove his love interest to the honeymoon town of Lonavala, where he showered her with gifts and finally lifted her veil to kiss her like a bride:
Then the absurdity of the situation strikes him. The preposterousness of his images, the foolishness of his feelings, the comicality of chasing currents that skim across Padmini's face. He thinks how absurd this whole trip has been, how absurd is the presence of the two of them in Lonavala, how absurd is the scenery itself that stretches before them. He thinks of poor, ridiculous Mr. Jalal, waiting back in Bombay for his Fiat, and of how Padmini will react when he asks her to buy them petrol so they can get back.
Vishnu also recalls his secret passion for Kavita Asrani, the beautiful teenage daughter of one of the families for whom he works. Given the protagonist's focus on his hapless love life, the scope of Suri's dazzling debut may appear narrow. However, the apartment house upon whose floor Vishnu spends his final hours functions as a microcosm of Indian society. It helps to know even a smattering about Hindu mythology or India's religious conflicts. But even if you don't, there is plenty to relish in The Death of Vishnu, with its comical, richly drawn characters, loving attention to the details of everyday life, and provocative exploration of destiny and free will. --Regina Marler [via]
More editions of The Death of Vishnu:
- The Death of Vishnu: ISBN 006000438X (0-06-000438-X)
  Softcover, Perennial
- The Death of Vishnu: ISBN 0393050424 (0-393-05042-4)
  Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
Desirable Daughters
by Bharati Mukherjee

ISBN 0786885157 (0-7868-8515-7)
Softcover, Hyperion Books

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More editions of Desirable Daughters:
- Desirable Daughters: ISBN 0786865989 (0-7868-6598-9)
  Hardcover, Hyperion Books
- Desirable Daughters: ISBN 0786885157 (0-7868-8515-7)
  Softcover, Hyperion Books
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Die Satanischen Verse
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 3426606488 (3-426-60648-8)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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More editions of Die Satanischen Verse:
- Die Satanischen Verse: ISBN 3426606488 (3-426-60648-8)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc
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East, West
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0679757899 (0-679-75789-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence. [via]
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An Equal Music
by Vikram Seth

ISBN 037570924X (0-375-70924-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
The violinist hero of Vikram Seth's third novel would very much like to be hearing secret harmonies. Instead, living in London 10 years after a key disaster, Michael Holme is easily irritated by his beautiful young (and even French!) girlfriend and by his colleagues in the Maggiore Quartet. In short, he's fed up with playing second fiddle in life and art. Yet a chance encounter with Julia, the pianist he had loved and lost in Vienna, brings Michael sudden bliss. Her situation, however--and the secret that may end her career--threatens to undo the lovers.
An Equal Music is a fraction of the size of Seth's A Suitable Boy, but is still deliciously expansive. In under 400 pages, the author offers up exquisite complexities, personal and lyrical, while deftly fielding any fears that he's composed a Harlequin for highbrows. During one emotional crescendo, Michael tells Julia, "I don't know how I've lived without you all these years," only to realize, "how feeble and trite my words sound to me, as if they have been plucked out of some housewife fantasy." In addition to the pitch of its love story, one of the book's joys lies in Seth's creation of musical extremes. As the Maggiore rehearses, moving from sniping and impatience to perfection, the author expertly notates the joys of collaboration, trust, and creation. "It's the weirdest thing, a quartet," one member remarks. "I don't know what to compare it to. A marriage? a firm? a platoon under fire? a self-regarding, self-destructive priesthood? It has so many different tensions mixed in with its pleasures."
An Equal Music is a novel in which the length of Schubert's Trout Quintet matters deeply, the discovery of a little-known Beethoven opus is a miracle, and each instrument has its own being. Just as Michael can't hope to possess Julia, he cannot even dream of owning his beloved Tononi, the violin he has long had only on loan. And it goes without saying that Vikram Seth knows how to tell a tale, keeping us guessing about everything from what the Quartet's four-minute encore will be to what really occasioned Julia's departure from Michael's life. (Or was it in fact Michael who abandoned Julia?) As this love story ranges from London to Michael's birthplace in the north of England to Vienna to Venice, few readers will remain deaf to its appeals. --Kerry Fried [via]
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Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry

ISBN 140003065X (1-4000-3065-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A fiction work by Rohinto Mistry and published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd in Canada in 1995. In paperback format, it has 822 pages. [via]
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Furia / Fury
by Salman Rushdie, Miguel Saenz

ISBN 8497596420 (84-9759-642-0)
Softcover, Debolsillo

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Book summary:
Malik Solanka, original de Bombay, filósofo educado en Cambridge e inventor de una popular muñeca, abandona un día a su familia en Londres, sin dar ninguna explicación, y se escapa a Nueva York. Lleva la furia dentro y teme haberse convertido en un peligro para los que quiere. Llega a Nueva York en un momento de abundancia sin precedentes, el colmo de la riqueza y del poder americano. Pero la furia está a su alrededor... Un asesino en serie mata a mujeres con un trozo de cemento. Una mujer joven con un gorro de béisbol le acecha. Y otra mujer, de quien se enamorará, le atraerá con una furia diferente, una furia con raíces en un país lejano. Mientras tanto pierde el control de sus propios pensamientos, emociones y deseos. Un gran amor que se ha echado a perder, una pasión que se apoya en cimientos falsos y un tercer amor que, con un poco de suerte, a lo mejor sale bien. Furia es una obra de energía explosiva, despiadada, y a la vez una comedia negra, una investigación profundamente inquietante del lado más oscuro de la naturaleza humana y de la sociedad opulenta. Pocas veces se ha logrado captar la esencia de un lugar y de un tiempo tan intensa y exactamente en una novela. [via]
More editions of Furia / Fury:
- Furia / Fury: ISBN 8497596420 (84-9759-642-0)
  Softcover, Debolsillo
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God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy

ISBN 0060977493 (0-06-097749-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. [via]
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0312254997 (0-312-25499-7)
Softcover, Picador USA

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Book summary:
Salman Rushdie's most ambitious and accomplished novel, sure to be hailed as his masterpiece. At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man," the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book's true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It is a tale of love, death, and rock 'n' roll. [via]
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0140157379 (0-14-015737-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Immediately forget any preconceptions you may have about Salman Rushdie and the controversy that has swirled around his million-dollar head. You should instead know that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables and parables, from any culture. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a delightful tale about a storyteller who loses his skill and a struggle against mysterious forces attempting to block the seas of inspiration from which all stories are derived. Here's a representative passage about the sources and power of inspiration:
So Iff the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive.
"And if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip a cup into the Ocean," Iff told Haroun, "like so," and here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets, "and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story, like so," as he did precisely that.
[via]
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Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
by Kiran Desai

ISBN 0385493703 (0-385-49370-3)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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More editions of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard:
- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard: ISBN 0871137119 (0-87113-711-9)
  Hardcover, Atlantic Monthly Pr
- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard: ISBN 0385493703 (0-385-49370-3)
  Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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The Hungry Tide
by Amitav Ghosh

ISBN 061871166X (0-618-71166-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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The new novel from the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal. An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea. It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh's new novel. In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator. And it is into this terrain that an eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans. In January 2001, a small ship arrives to conduct an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment, and the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society. [via]
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In Beautiful Disguises
by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

ISBN 1582341273 (1-58234-127-3)
Softcover, Bloomsbury Publishing

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In Beautiful Disguises tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl living in a small town in South India. Life is not easy, especially when she's been blessed with a family that includes a brother who watches TV as an occupation; a father who drinks and regularly bullies his family in alcoholic rage; and a silent, all-suffering mother. Insulated by her dreams of becoming Audrey Hepburn (and daily trips to the local cinema), she observes her family with critical detachment. But her inner world begins to crumble when the inevitable marriage is arranged for her and she runs away to Delhi to work as a maid. There, she falls in with the misfit members of her new household; Raju, the servant with the heart of a revolutionary, Maneka the maid who mysteriously disappears every night, and the seductive but arrogant Armand. But even as she embraces this brave new world she realizes that she can't run forever.

Balasubramanyam writes with an effortless air and a strong sense of mischief, but this lightness is shot through with intelligence and a compassion for human frailty. He has created an unforgettable heroine--childlike but determined, naïve yet shrewd--whose delightful voice resonates through the book.
[via]
More editions of In Beautiful Disguises:
- In Beautiful Disguises: ISBN 1582341273 (1-58234-127-3)
  Softcover, Bloomsbury Publishing
The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai

ISBN 0802142818 (0-8021-4281-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
324 p. 24 cm. Cream hardcover in mylar-covered dustjacket. [via]
More editions of The Inheritance of Loss:
- The Inheritance of Loss: ISBN 0871139294 (0-87113-929-4)
  Hardcover, Atlantic Monthly Pr
- The Inheritance of Loss: ISBN 0802142818 (0-8021-4281-8)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Interpreter of Maladies: Library Edition
by Jhumpa Lahiri, Janet Silver

ISBN 039592720X (0-395-92720-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection. Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. His fare on this particular day is Mr. and Mrs. Das--first-generation Americans of Indian descent--and their children. During the course of the afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamored of Mrs. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret.
I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. Eight years, Mr. Kapasi, I've been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better; say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.
Of course, Mr. Kapasi has no cure for what ails Mrs. Das--or himself. Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0670817570 (0-670-81757-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
In this timeless, haunting portrait of the people and the politics of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to life the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. [via]
More editions of The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey:
- The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey: ISBN 0670817570 (0-670-81757-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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Jasmine
by Bharati Mukherjee

ISBN 0802136303 (0-8021-3630-3)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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&quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear ... and foretold my widowhood and exile," relates Jyoti, fifth cursed daughter in a family of nine. Though she can't escape fate, Jyoti reinvents herself time and again. She leaves her dusty Punjabi village to marry as Jasmine; travels rough, hidden airways and waters to America to reemerge as Jase, an illegal "day mummy" in hip Manhattan; and lands beached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenage Vietnamese refugee and "wife" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) makes each world exotic, her lyrical prose broken only by the violence Jasmine almost casually recounts and survives. [via]
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Junglee Girl
by Ginu Kamani

ISBN 1879960400 (1-879960-40-0)
Softcover, Aunt Lute Books

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Junglee stemming from the Sanskrit root, "junglee" is used in India to label the wild, the uncivilized, the untamed. Used most commonly as condemnation or censure, it aims to break the spirit of women yearning for personal power. The female protagonists in these eleven stories recklessly pursue their sensual paths through a complex social world that seeks to shut them out. With wily irreverence and a willful rawness, Kamani pulls back the veil of convention, inch by inch, and draws the reader into the disquieting truth of women's lives, charting territory both intimate and bizarre.

"In these 11 short stories, characters span the gamut of women, the irony being that in India's sexually repressive traditional society, this pejorative term [junglee girl] could be applied to any self-aware woman. But Kamani, a gifted, savvy writer, combines such precarious, complex elements as class, caste, gender and eroticism into readable, imaginative and often hilarious tales."Publishers Weekly

"Kamani is a gifted writer able to tackle harsh, provocative subjects while maintaining a lyrical quality and an engrossing ambiguity."San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Book Review

An interview with Ginu Kamani:

It has been three years since the publication of Ginu Kamanis highly successful short story collection Junglee Girl, and thinking it might be interesting for readers to hear Ginu reflect on what the book has meant for her and what shes up to now, Aunt Lute dispatched staffer Livia Tenzer to interview Ginu.

Livia Tenzer: Did the publication of Junglee Girl cause any changes in your life?

Ginu Kamani: Not only has the book changed my life, but in many ways it has made my life. Beyond the physical fact of having a book out in print, and laying claim to the category "published author," what I deal with on a regular basis are the ripples that have spread out from negotiating intersections of culture, gender, sex and class in a public forum. Junglee Girl has very much fulfilled the role of the proverbial rock thrown into the bush, and has made room for me, as a thinker, doer, writer, on a spectrum of excavation, investigation, and a
[via]
More editions of Junglee Girl:
- Junglee Girl: ISBN 1879960400 (1-879960-40-0)
  Softcover, Aunt Lute Books
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The Last Jet-Engine Laugh
by Ruchir Joshi

ISBN 8172234309 (81-7223-430-9)
Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers India

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Book summary:
This is a debut novel from India of an utterly original kind. Joshi has found a style and a form in which to say new things about the Indian experience in a new manner. Like Roy, Joshi is doing something entirely fresh. The novel takes three generations of a Gujarati family and uses them to track the course of Indian history back to 1930 and forward into the first decades of the next century. The grandparents are disciples of Gandhi, smart, sarcastic and principled; they meet on a non-violent demonstration against British rule in Calcutta in the 1930s, fall in love while falling under the army's baton. Their only son, Paresh, our principal narrator, grows up to drift through life, torn in different directions all at once. In turn, he produces a daughter, Para, who is tomboyish, aggressive, martial, and, in her sequences in the book, a squadron leader in the Indian Air Force when, in the near future, India is at war with a Muslim Pakistani-Iranian alliance. She therefore kills people for a living and is the antithesis of her grandparents' principles of Gandhiesque non-violence, civil disobedience and passive resistance. This trajectory of Indian history from non-violence to belligerent jingoism is reflected in key episodes in the lives of this family. All four key characters are fascinating, and each of the setpieces in which they figure is stunningly handled by Joshi. The writing is sharp, modern, fluent and varied. Joshi is equally adept at handling crowd scenes, midair battles, sexual farce and embarrassing encounters. It is a book that is jaded and yet principled, ribald and yet serious, laddish and yet sensitive. It feels authentic, considered and moving at all times. It's a winner. [via]
More editions of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh:
- The Last Jet-Engine Laugh: ISBN 8172234309 (81-7223-430-9)
  Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers India
The Last Song of Dusk
by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

ISBN 1559707348 (1-55970-734-8)
Hardcover, Little Brown & Co

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- The Last Song of Dusk: ISBN 1559707348 (1-55970-734-8)
  Hardcover, Little Brown & Co
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Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
by Meera Syal

ISBN 1565846141 (1-56584-614-1)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
Meera Syal's second novel features a trio of close and somewhat unlikely childhood friends. Sunita, a former law student and activist, has married her university sweetheart Akash, and is settled into a life of overweight, underappreciated motherhood. Tania is a raven-maned beauty who's rejected marriage and anything traditionally Asian for a high-flying TV career and a compliant Indophile boyfriend. And then there's Chila. Innocent, kind, funny Chila, with her simple soul and her glass animal collection, has just, to everyone's amazement, snared Deepak--the "most eligible bachelor within a twenty-mile radius."
A comedienne and actress as well as the author of the prize-winning Anita and Me, Syal expertly steers her characters through what we might call middle youth--that emotional roller coaster of an age when the real growing up is done. Everywhere her trademark wit and sensitivity are on display. There's the inevitable bitching at the wedding: "Now the sister is howling. I'd howl if I had a moustache like hers..." Then, after the ceremony, come the traditional tears:
Tissue-clutching matriarchs reattached themselves to harrumphing husbands, reaffirming their bonds to each other and the watching world. Single girls clucked in feverish groups, high on the drama of the departure, tossing their fancy dupattas at the single men, torn between the horror and the longing of it all.
What comes after that, alas, is infidelity and envy and betrayal. True to its stoic title, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee encompasses not only the strengths but the limits of female friendship. Yet the author retains her sense of humor and cross-cultural irony to the very end. One final note: if you're pregnant and have set your heart on natural childbirth, avoid pages 72 and 73. Or else book that elective cesarean and painkilling cocktail. Now. --Lisa Gee [via]
More editions of Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee:
- Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee: ISBN 1565846141 (1-56584-614-1)
  Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0812976533 (0-8129-7653-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.
We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Mistress of Spices
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN 0385482388 (0-385-48238-8)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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On a mythic island of women "where on our skin, the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds" powerful spices like cinnamon, turmeric, and fenugreek whisper their secrets to young acolytes. Ordained after trial by fire, each new spice mistress is sent to a far-off land to cure the life pains of all Indian seekers, while keeping a cool distance from the mortals. Only stubborn, passionate Tilo, disguised as an old woman merchant in present-day Oakland, California, fails to heed the vengeful spices' warnings. Fragrant with spice and sensuality, this winning tale rolls off the tongue. Written in the soaring, poetic tradition of China Men and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. [via]
More editions of The Mistress of Spices:
- The Mistress of Spices: ISBN 038548237X (0-385-48237-X)
  Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
- The Mistress of Spices: ISBN 0385482388 (0-385-48238-8)
  Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri

ISBN 0618485228 (0-618-48522-8)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks.
Awkwardness is Gogol's birthright. He grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never quite find his place in the world. There's a lovely section where he dates a wealthy, cultured young Manhattan woman who lives with her charming parents. They fold Gogol into their easy, elegant life, but even here he can find no peace and he breaks off the relationship. His mother finally sets him up on a blind date with the daughter of a Bengali friend, and Gogol thinks he has found his match. Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she inhabits. She has found, however, a circuitous escape: "At Brown, her rebellion had been academic ... she'd pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge--she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, ore expectation of any kind." Lahiri documents these quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. --Claire Dederer [via]
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Operation Monsoon: Stories
by Shona Ramaya

ISBN 1555973876 (1-55597-387-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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- Operation Monsoon: Stories: ISBN 1555973876 (1-55597-387-6)
  Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Plain Tales from the Hills
by Rudyard Kipling

ISBN 1421979756 (1-4219-7975-6)
Softcover, Indypublish.Com

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First published in 1888, Plain Tales from the Hills was Kipling's first volume of prose fiction. His vignettes of life in British India give vivid insights into Anglo-India at work and play, and into the character of the Indians themselves. Witty, wry, sometimes cynical, these tales with their brevity and concentration of effect are landmarks in the history of the short story as an art-form. [via]
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Queen Of Dreams
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN 1400030447 (1-4000-3044-7)
Softcover, Anchor Books

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Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others. This gift fascinates Rakhi but also isolates her from her mother's past. Rakhi's solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which open the long-closed door to her past.
Available only in Wheeler Hardcover 6. [via]
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Red Earth and Pouring Rain
by Vikram Chandra, Jordan Pavlin

ISBN 0316132934 (0-316-13293-4)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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A tale of 19th-century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone "mad with poetry". Woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, modern narrative - the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends. [via]
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The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0312270828 (0-312-27082-8)
Softcover, Picador

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No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner. [via]
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Sister of My Heart
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN 038548951X (0-385-48951-X)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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From the award-winning author of Mistress of Spices, the bestselling novel about the extraordinary bond between two women, and the family secrets and romantic jealousies that threaten to tear them apart.Anju is the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family of distinction. Her cousin Sudha is the daughter of the black sheep of that same family. Sudha is startlingly beautiful; Anju is not. Despite those differences, since the day on which the two girls were born, the same day their fathers died--mysteriously and violently--Sudha and Anju have been sisters of the heart. Bonded in ways even their mothers cannot comprehend, the two girls grow into womanhood as if their fates as well as their hearts were merged. But, when Sudha learns a dark family secret, that connection is shattered. For the first time in their lives, the girls know what it is to feel suspicion and distrust. Urged into arranged marriages, Sudha and Anju's lives take opposite turns. Sudha becomes the dutiful daughter-in-law of a rigid small-town household. Anju goes to America with her new husband and learns to live her own life of secrets. When tragedy strikes each of them, however, they discover that despite distance and marriage, they have only each other to turn to. Set in the two worlds of San Francisco and India, this exceptionally moving novel tells a story at once familiar and exotic, seducing readers from the first page with the lush prose we have come to expect from Divakaruni. Sister of My Heart is a novel destined to become as widely beloved as it is acclaimed. [via]
More editions of Sister of My Heart:
- Sister of My Heart: ISBN 0385489501 (0-385-48950-1)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
- Sister of My Heart: ISBN 038548951X (0-385-48951-X)
  Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth

ISBN 0060786523 (0-06-078652-3)
Softcover, Perennial

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Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata's--and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra's--attempts to find a suitable boy for Lata, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in the early 1950s in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence. [via]
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The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN 0385497288 (0-385-49728-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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From acclaimed and beloved author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni comes a new collection of moving stories about family, culture, and the seduction of memory. With the rich prose and keen insight that made Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart national bestsellers, these tales of journeys and returns, of error, of loss and recovery, all resound with her unique understanding of the human spirit."Don't we all have to pay, no matter what we choose?" a young woman asks in "The Love of a Good Man," one of the unforgettable stories in Chitra Divakaruni's beautifully crafted exploration of the tensions between new lives and old. In tales set in India and the United States, she illuminates the transformations of personal landscapes, real and imagined, brought about by the choices men and women make at every stage of their lives."The Love of a Good Man" tells of an Indian woman happily settled in the United States who must confront the past when her long-estranged father begs to meet his only grandson. In the acclaimed "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," a widow, inadvertently eavesdropping, discovers that her cherished, old-fashioned ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law. A young American woman joins a pilgrimage of women in Kashmir and, in the land of her ancestors, comes to view herself and her family in a new light in "The Lives of Strangers." Two women, uprooted from their native land by violence and deception, find unexpected comfort and hope in each other in "The Blooming Season for Cacti." And in the title story, a young woman turns to her painting and the wisdom of her grandmother for the strength to accept her fiance's past when it arrives on her doorstep.Whether writing about the adjustments of immigrants to a foreign land or the accommodations families make to the disruptive differences between generations, Divakaruni poignantly portrays the eternal struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the allure of change. [via]
More editions of The Unknown Errors of Our Lives:
- The Unknown Errors of Our Lives: ISBN 038549727X (0-385-49727-X)
  Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
- The Unknown Errors of Our Lives: ISBN 0385497288 (0-385-49728-8)
  Softcover, Random House Inc

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Furia / Fury
by Salman Rushdie, Miguel Saenz Sagaseta

ISBN 8401341655 (84-01-34165-5)
Hardcover, Arete

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- Furia / Fury: ISBN 8401341655 (84-01-34165-5)
  Hardcover, Arete
Interprete De Emociones / Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri, Antonio Padilla

ISBN 848453961X (84-8453-961-X)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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- Interprete De Emociones / Interpreter of Maladies: ISBN 848453961X (84-8453-961-X)
  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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Shalimar El Payaso
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 8439713797 (84-397-1379-7)
Softcover, Grijalbo Mondadori

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Book summary:
Los Ángeles, 1991. El embajador Maximilian Ophuls es asesinado a plena luz del día en la puerta de la casa de India, su hija ilegítima, víctima del cuchillo de su chófer musulmán, originario de Cachemira, que se hace llamar Shalimar el payaso. Maximilian Ophuls es un héroe de la resistencia de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, un hombre de gran talento intelectual y fuerte atractivo erótico, ex embajador estadounidense en la India y jefe antiterrorista de Estados Unidos. A primera vista, el crimen parece ser de naturaleza política, pero pronto se descubre que el móvil no es tan simple. Esta es la historia de Max, su asesino y su hija, y de un cuarto personaje, la mujer que les une. Es un relato épico que se mueve entre California, Cachemira, Francia e Inglaterra. Por el camino encontramos historias de princesas raptadas por demonios, leyendas de reyes que defienden sus tierras del mal. En Shalimar el payaso hay bondad capaz de hacer milagros, pero también hay guerra sucia,inevitable e interminable. Y, como siempre, está el amor, conquistado y perdido, con su rara belleza y su mortal peligro. [via]
More editions of Shalimar El Payaso:
- Shalimar El Payaso: ISBN 8439713797 (84-397-1379-7)
  Softcover, Grijalbo Mondadori
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Un Viaje Muy Largo/ A Very Long Trip
by Mistry Rohinton Mistry Books Inc

ISBN 8439703309 (84-397-0330-9)
Softcover, Random House Mondadori

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Book summary:
PERFECT CONDITION [via]
More editions of Un Viaje Muy Largo/ A Very Long Trip:
- Un Viaje Muy Largo/ A Very Long Trip: ISBN 8439703309 (84-397-0330-9)
  Softcover, Random House Mondadori
El Vagon De Las Mujeres/ladies Coupe
by Anita Nair

ISBN 8420465119 (84-204-6511-9)
Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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- El Vagon De Las Mujeres/ladies Coupe: ISBN 8420465119 (84-204-6511-9)
  Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc

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Il Dio Delle Piccole Cose
by Arundhati Roy

ISBN 8850200005 (88-502-0000-5)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
Ammu, figlia di un alto funzionario, lascia un marito violento e torna a casa con i suoi bambini, i gemelli Estha e Rahel, maschio e femmina. Ma nellIndia meridionale dei tardi anni Sessanta, una donna divorziata come lei si ritrova priva di una posizione sociale riconosciuta, soprattutto se commette lerrore di innamorarsi di un paria. I gemelli vogliono bene a Velutha, lintoccabile che la madre può amare solo in segreto, e attraverso il loro sguardo, capace di cogliere le piccole cose e i piccoli eventi, prende forma la storia di un grande amore, in cui si riflette il tema universale dei sentimenti in conflitto con le convenzioni. Nei loro pensieri e nelle loro parole risuona la critica più radicale a ogni legge che stabilisce chi si deve amare, e come, e quanto. [via]
More editions of Il Dio Delle Piccole Cose:
- Il Dio Delle Piccole Cose: ISBN 8850200005 (88-502-0000-5)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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