The Drought and Other Stories by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee

A collection of stories from one of India's all time classic writers, the author of Srikanta, Charitraheen, Parineeta, Devdas . . .

1. The Drought  [see here for original]
2. The Snake-charmer’s Daughter
3. A Gleam of light
4. Ramlal's Conversion
5. The Portrait
6. Abhagi's Heaven!  [see here for original]

Complete works of the author in original here.

Rupture by Sampurna Chattarji

She is running on dream walkways into the day that will dawn bright, like any other, hanging by a thread on a piece of news, a pendulum swinging from now to then, before to after, panic to peace to panic, capital to city, city to suburb, remembering to forgetting . . .

In the course of twenty-four hours, nine characters across five cities are faced with a pressing need to examine their past. As each of them confronts the realities within, the world itself explodes into chaos, the disintegration of civic order mirroring the breakdown of individual sanities.

A powerful first novel from a critically acclaimed poet, translator and fiction-writer, Rupture is a book in which every word, every emotion resonates with a heightened sense of intensity. Sampurna Chattarji brings to her writing a poetry and potency that is rare, and the sheer pace of the narrative pulls the reader in with its urgency.

Preview:

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee

‘Agastya's story is convincing, entertaining, moving—and timeless. It merits an accolade that's far harder to earn than "authentic." It’s a classic'

— The New York Times

Agastya Sen is a young Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs.

As the novel opens he has been posted to the small provincial town of Madna.

First published in 1988, English, August, a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks, is a cult classic.

The Last Salute (Shesh Namaskar) by Santosh Kumar Ghosh

Shesh Namaskar is the story of a young man, basically innocent but now gone astray. In his ruthless search for a meaning of life, there is a sadness that both ennobles and elevates the mind. Shesh Namaskar is written in the form of a series of letters from a son to his mother who had left home, never to return, when the son had accused her of being unfaithful when he was younger. Through these letters he finds way of discovering his own self. As a last tribute of reverence, he seeks forgiveness from his mother just before his death. This outstanding novel published in 1971 won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972.

See here for a review of this translation.

Preview:

Turbulence by Samit Basu

'You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll gasp and you will demand a sequel'

BEN AARONOVITCH (Doctor Who)

'For wicked wit, for post-modern superheroics, for sheer verbal energy and dazzle, Samit Basu doesn't so much push the envelope as fold it into an n-dimensional hyper-envelope, address it to your hind-brain and mail it with a rail gun'

MIKE CAREY

(X-Men, Lucifer, the Felix Castor series)

How would you feel if you got what you really wanted? What would you do if you were given the power to change the world?

Everyone on BA flight 142 from London to Delhi got off it with a unique superpower. A power they didn't even know they wanted. Everyone, that is, who's still alive. Because someone is hunting down the passengers.

And now Aman Sen's ragtag collective of rogue superhumans is in grave danger. They must decide what to do with their powers and their lives — and quickly.

This explosive new blockbuster moves at hyperspeed across two continents as colliding forces move towards an action-packed finale that will leave the world — and you — changed forever.

East-West (Purbo-Paschim) Part II by Sunil Gangopadhyay

Outside a plush hotel in New York, an Indian youth is seen waiting for an appointment. He is desperately in need of a job. He is Atin, the young boy of Part One who gets mixed up in politics, and is obliged to leave the country, much against his will. He is still a revolutionary at heart, he hates his exile in America.

The large canvas of this novel covers three continents, but more particularly the dramatic events following the partition of India, the political unrest in West Bengal, the plight of the refugees and the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh. The social and political reality instead of remaining a backdrop takes on centre stage where simultaneously individual lives unfold, each with it's own account of love, hate, passion and betrayal. The author takes a dispassionate look at the Naxal revolutionaries, exposing their vulnerability, the colossal tragedy of so many promising lives coming to a pointless end. On the other side, in the other Bengal, events move to an inexorable climax, while the fictional characters flit across the stage, the shadow of actual historical figures loom large — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, General Niazi and the day by day account of how the mighty Pakistan Army, one of the best in the world was doomed to a most humiliating defeat.

This novel of epic proportions is an unique experiment in blending fiction with facts, an attempt to truthfully capture a swiftly moving course of events, a compelling novel difficult to put down. This novel had won the prestigious Ananda Puraskar in 1989.

For Bengali original, see here: 1 + 2.

Fantasy Omnibus II

1. Mythohistorical Thrillers by Ashwin Sanghi

i) The Rozabal Line
ii) Chanakya’s Chant
iii) The Krishna Key

2. The Awakening Trilogy by Josephine Angelini

i) Starcrossed
ii) Dreamless
iii) Goddess

3. Novels by Neil Gaiman

i) Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (with Terry Pratchett)
ii) Neverwhere 
iii) Stardust 
iv) American Gods
v) Anansi Boys 
vi) The Ocean at the End of the Lane

4. Abandon Trilogy by Meg Cabot

i) Abandon
ii) Underworld
iii) Awaken

05 – Goddess Test Series by Aimée Carter

01 – The Goddess Test
01.5 – The Goddess Hunt
02 – Goddess Interrupted
02.5 – The Goddess Legacy
03 – The Goddess Inheritance

06 – Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B Cooney

Link: Box

Weight Loss by Upamanyu Chatterjee

'Between the ages of eighteen and thirty-seven, when he died, Bhola had just eight sexual partners, four women and four males. When he reviewed his life...it pleased him that he had maintained a balance between genders in his choice of lovers. Of course, it was ridiculous that he should at the age of thirty-seven be lightheadedly embarrassed about how few were the people he had slept with. Then he reminded himself that that was nothing new, that he had always felt ridiculous, not to worry.'

Weight Loss, Upamanyu Chatterjee's fourth novel, is only tangentially about losing weight. And though the hero dies tragically young, it is, fundamentally, comic.

Bhola, innocent and unremarkable, but for his near crippling obsession with sex and running, fears taking on the burden of emotional commitment and goes through life falling in love with all kinds of inappropriate people. At school, he lusts indiscriminately after his teachers, of both sexes, and is attracted to eunuchs. While in college, far from home, he has vaguely demeaning affairs with his landlady and with a vegetable vendor-cum-nurse and her husband. Later, he marries (a woman who sings with a voice of liquid gold), fathers a daughter (‘a warm, living thing') and suspects he is close to balance and beauty. Then his past catches up with him.

Upamanyu Chatterjee's genius for black humour and the absurd has never been more compelling than in this unforgettable portrait of a lost life.

Mainak Dhar Omnibus

1. Alice in Deadland Series

Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it's legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters. Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases. 

What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill. A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland- a book called Alice in Wonderland.

i) Off With Their Heads
ii) Alice in Deadland
iii) Through the Killing Glass
iv) Hunting the Snark
v) Deadland

2. Heroes R Us

What happens when fate chooses an ordinary man for an extraordinary mission?

Arnab Banerjee, a shy twenty-five-year-old, has little excitement in his life other than tracking down missing books as an assistant librarian in a Delhi college. But all that changes when one day he is beaten up during a bank robbery. He awakens to discover that he has developed superhuman powers, which he hones with the help of Khan chacha, an ex-army man. And so begins his crusade against eve-teasers, corrupt policemen, and scheming politicians. But in his final adventure to thwart a deadly terror attack, Delhi’s ‘Guardian Angel’ is forced to join hands with the very men he has fought against: the minister who wants to use him to rig elections, the policemen who tried to kill him in an ‘encounter’, and the liquor baron who invited him to become his brand ambassador. Will he succeed in his mission and still preserve his ideals?​

3. Vimana

Legends have it that Gods flew in aircraft called vimanas and waged war with fantastic weapons. What if these turned out to be true? College student by day and wannabe fighter pilot by night, Aaditya’s immense knowledge of flying and fighter planes is displayed only on flight sims and Internet forums.

A chance encounter propels him into the centre of an ancient conflict between good and evil that has been raging for thousands of years, revealing to him a hidden world that we dismiss as mere myths from our ancient past. Alongside Shiva, Karthik, Durga, Indra and other gods, Aaditya has to stop the terrible plans of Kalki, the prodigal son. Seated at the controls of a vimana, Aaditya finds himself living his dream in a way he had never imagined possible!

4. Zombiestan

It began with stories of undead Taliban rampaging through Afghan villages, and faster than anyone could have anticipated; the darkness spreads through the world. In a world laid waste by this new terror, four unlikely companions have been thrown together- a seventeen year old boy dealing with the loss of his family, a US Navy SEAL trying to get back home, an aging, lonely writer with nobody to live for, and a young girl trying to keep her three year old brother safe. 

When they discover that the smallest amongst them holds the key to removing the scourge that threatens to destroy their world, they begin an epic journey to a rumoured safe zone high in the Himalayas. A journey that will pit them against their own worst fears and the most terrible dangers- both human and undead.

A journey through a wasteland now known as Zombiestan.

East-West (Purbo-Paschim) Part I by Sunil Gangopadhyay

                East-West is a Bengali novel set against the backdrop of the biggest exodus in human history—the 1947 partition of India. That a newly born country could exist as two geographically separated units was also an unheard of event. But the inevitable had to happen. Culturally and linguistically dissimilar, East and West Pakistan had to forge their different destinies.

             This novel is a record of those tumultuous times in East Pakistan as well as in Indian Bengal. But their problems were vastly different. The story, revolving around two college friends, both Bengali though one Hindu and the other Muslim soon takes into its expanding orbit other characters, families, issues. The two friends drift apart, separated by the political division, then each is caught up in his own problem. There is no sentimental reunion, in fact the novel precariously poised, steers clear of sentimentality. There is the unspoken and inescapable bitter conclusion— perhaps the twain can never meet. Under the deceptively simple surface are hidden deeper and more complex human issues. East and west were initially a demarcation on the map but soon west recedes further as younger people from the east migrate to the US and the UK leaving the aging parents at home. Sunrise and sunset are two other symbols spun into the fabric of the novel, pointing to the evolution of human life, the movement from birth to death. Thus from a partition novel set at a particular place and time, it rises to the level of the universal, encompassing the entire gamut of human emotions and cultural encounters.

             

Bengali original: Download here: 1 + 2.

The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh

Over the past two decades or so, Amitav Ghosh has enthralled readers with novels and travelogues that have acquired the status of modern classics: The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace.

Much less known is the fact that, simultaneously, over all these years, Amitav Ghosh has been writing non-fictional prose — reflective essays, activist pieces, political commentary, book reviews, autobiographical articles, academic expositions, translations from Bengali, and literary anthropology.

Here, for the first time, is as complete a collection as can be made of the prose which reveals that relatively unknown Amitav Ghosh: the novelist as thinker, the man of ideas as a writer of luminous, illuminating non-fiction.

This considerable and distinguished body of writing has appeared sporadically and been scattered within periodicals and magazines, learned journals and academic books. It has never been available as a single body of ideas, as the large and singular bedrock upon which Amitav Ghosh’s fictional imagination has drawn. Readers of these wonderful essays will discover that — to quote the novelist himself — ‘despite the difference in form and diction, they share with my fiction certain characteristic subjects and concerns.’

Ghosh’s concerns here, as in his novels, are with exploring the connection between past and present, between events and memories, and between people, cultures and countries that have shared a past. India and Egypt, Islam and Hinduism, the Mughal Emperor Babur and the would-be empress Indira Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore's Bengal and Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir, the novel and history, fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism, migration and diaspora—all these themes come alive in the essays of one of the most lucid and captivating writers of modern times.

Contents

1 The Imam and the Indian

2 Tibetan Dinner

3 Four Corners

4 An Egyptian in Baghdad

5 The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi

6 The Human Comedy in Cairo

7 Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel

8 Empire and Soul: a review of The Baburnama

9 The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village

10 Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy

11 The Slave of MS. H.6

12 The Diaspora in Indian Culture

13 The Global Reservation:Notes toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping

14 The Fundamentalist Challenge

15 The March of the Novel through History: the Testimony of my Grandfather’s Bookcase (Winner, Pushcart Prize, 1999)

16 The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness

17 The Hunger of Stones (a translation of 'Kshudhita Pâshân' by Rabindranath Tagore)

18 ‘The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn

Chetan Bhagat Omnibus

From India's toppest selling author in English.

1. Five Point Someone

2. One Night @ the Call Center

3. The 3 Mistakes of My Life

4. 2 States

5. Revolution 2020

6. What Young India Wants


Link:

Box

Shadow from Ladakh by Bhabani Bhattacharya

In this epoch-making novel, the author provides a true insight into contemporary India, in the backdrop of China-India flareup. He tells an extremely gripping story of unsurpassed drama, on a broad and revealing canvas. Bhashkar, an American-trained Chief Engineer in a steel plant, wants to dispossess Gandhigram, because it is a hindrance to India's industrialization. He brings every pressure to bear, but to his surprise, the community of the believers in non-violence stands firm under its great leader, Satyajit, and he himself falls in love with Satyajit's daughter Sumita, a barefoot, white-saried girl . . .

A cult novel from one of the forerunners of the Indian novel in English, it won of the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1967.

For snippet view at Google Books, click here.

Preview below:

Amitav Ghosh Omnibus

From one of the frontline authors of India's English literature

1. The Circle of Reason (Prix Médicis étranger, France, 1990, for French translation: Les feux du Bengale)

2. The Shadow Lines (Sahitya Akademi Award, India, for English, 1989 and Ananda Puraskar, West Bengal, 1989)

3. The Calcutta Chromosome (Arthur C. Clarke Award, U.K., 1997)

4. The Glass Palace (selected for Commonwealth Writers' Prize; refused; Myanmar National Literature Award for Burmese translation, 2012, Grand Prize for Fiction, Frankfurt eBook Award, 2001)

5. The Hungry Tide (Hutch Crossword Book Award, India, 2004; finalist, Kiriyama Prize, USA, 2006)

6. Sea of Poppies (Ibis Trilogy 01) (Vodafone Crossword Book Award, India, 2008, Indiaplaza Golden Quill Book Award, India, 2009, Tagore Literature Award, 2012 and Dan David Prize, Israel, 2010; also shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize)

7. River of Smoke (Ibis Trilogy 02) (shortlisted for Man Booker Asian Literary Prize 2012)

8. In an Antique Land (non-fiction)

9. Countdown

Link: Box

Version with The Imam and the Indian: Box

Chowringhee by Sankar

'Here, day and night were interchangeable. The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.'

Written in the format of a hotel receptionist's memoirs, the novel contains anecdote after anecdote about what happens in a hotel, the smallest story being that about two young American girls who were accompanying their father on a world tour. They left him in Bombay to attend to some urgent business and went off by themselves to Delhi. Apparently, they put up at Maidens Hotel. They went on a buying spree as tourists usually do and spent all their money. Having no options left, they sent an express telegram to their father. He was foxed by the cable his daughters had sent:  'All money spent. Can stay maidens no longer.'

Set in 1950s Kolkata, then Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis.

Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey's Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters—the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others—soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is a homage to a city and its people.

The novel, translated into English by Arunava Sinha, won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007 for the best translation.

For Bengali original, see here.

Jim Corbett Omnibus

1. Jungle Lore
2. Man-Eaters of Kumaon
3. The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag
4. My India
5. The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon
6. Tree Tops
7. About Jungle Stories
8. Jim Corbett's India (ed. R. E. Hawkins)
    a) Introduction
    b) Goongi
    c) Wild Life in the Village: an Appeal
9. The Jim Corbett Album
10. Wikipedia profile of the author

Fantasy Omnibus

1. Gameworld Trilogy by Samit Basu

                i) The Simoqin Prophecies
               ii) The Manticore’s Secret
              iii) The Unwaba Revelations 

2. Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi

                i) The Immortals of Meluha
               ii) The Secret of the Nagas
              iii) The Oath of the Vayuputras

3. Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
             
                i) Eragon
               ii) Eldest
              iii) Brisingr
              iv) Inheritance

4. Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud

             i) The Ring of Solomon
            ii) The Amulet of Samarkand
           iii) The Golem’s Eye
           iv) Ptolemy’s Gate


Link: DL