Book of Lives a Memoir of Sorts
by Margaret Atwood
One of the most anticipated memoirs of our times, two-time Booker-winning author Margaret Atwood’s memoir is a sum total of an 85-year-long life lived to the brim. Yet it rarely shows glimpses of the triumphalist tone that characterises works like this. Instead, Book of Lives is sharp and self-deprecatingly funny, and traces the life of one of the most defining voices of our times. Instead of throwing the reader into a world of excessive dinner parties, scandal or substance, Atwood joyously disappoints by taking us to her humble beginnings in the north of Quebec, where being the daughter of an insect-obsessed father meant spending six months of the year in the forest without electricity, running water or telephone every year.
Ghost Eye
by Amitav Ghosh
Continuing his obsession with the magic and measured cruelty of the Sunderban mangroves in the Indo-Gangetic delta, Ghost-Eye marks a return to fiction for Booker-nominated author Amitav Ghosh. In lucid prose peppered with pages of laboriously researched history, the novel follows the story of Varsha Gupta, a three-year-old child from a strictly vegetarian business family in Kolkata of the 1970s, as she wakes up one day, demands to eat fish and begins recalling memories of a past life inside a mud house by the river. Thrown into an immediate crisis, the family calls in psychologist and academic Dr Shoma Bose a visionary way ahead of her times and one deeply interested in the lores of reincarnation.
For the Love of Art: Lost Histories of Women In Kerala Theatre
by Sajitha Madathil
A groundbreaking historiography on the invisiblised histories of female creatives in the theatre space of Kerala, Sajitha Madathil’s 2010 polemic returns to a wider national audience in this vastly researched and patiently weighted translation by Jayasree Kalathil. Part of a series of new non-fiction translations from Indian languages titled ‘Chronicles’, the book, For the Love of Art: Lost Histories of Women In Kerala Theatre, addresses a major lacuna that exists in recountings of the history of Kerala’s mainstream theatre scene one that repeatedly omits the role and contribution of female creatives.
Portraits from Memory
by Mahadevi Varma
Growing up in a Bengali household, with Hindi as my second language in school, one of my greatest disappointments was never being able to share with my poetry-loving mother, the deeply felt, yet cautiously measured verses of Mahadevi Varma. Arguably one of the most important voices of 20th century Indian literature, two of Varma’s pen-portraits Ateet ke Chalchitra (1941) and Smriti ki Rekhayein (1943) find new life in this tender translation, titled Portraits from Memory, by Ruth Vanita.
Departure(s)
by Julian Barnes
The latest novel by the Booker-winning author of The Sense of An Ending (2011) follows two stories. Of a man named Stephen and a woman Jean, who first fall in love when they are young, and once again when they are old. Second, is the story of an elderly man called Jimmy who stands inevitably oblivious to his own mortality. In her typical lyrical verse, filled with the most beautiful images of mundane human existence, Julian Barnes returns to some of her recurrent themes of memory and frailty once again with this novel, titled Departure(s).
