Books

A Political Junkie’s Big Binge

Tunku Varadarajan

Forget the style and all those cliches, this book, written with the wonderment and adrenaline of a committed reporter, captures the drama of 2014 and the men who powered it

Love, Sex and Satraps

Arshia Sattar

A courtesan-turned-spy frolics in Pataliputra, revealing Mauryan mischief

Bringing Back the Queen

Burhan Wazir

AN Wilson’s majestic biography rehabilitates the much misinterpreted Victoria

A Miniaturist’s Offerings

Mahesh Rao

Mirza Waheed’s second novel, in the finest romantic tradition, depicts love amidst conflict in Kashmir

The Man, the Mind and the Game

Mini Kapoor

Here is a cricketer who was too young to consume the bottle of champagne he received upon winning his first man-of-the-match honour. The legend of Sachin Tendulkar in his own words

The Universal Islamist

Ranjit Hoskote

This biography of Allama Muhammad Iqbal redeems the philosopher-poet from political and nationalist stereotypes

Bleak House

Shougat Dasgupta

A collection of translated short stories by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay reveals his preoccupation with man’s inhumanity

Dharma Drama

Aditya Wig

In their retellings of India’s ancient past, these writers fall somewhere between shallow revisionism and ponderous pontification

The return of a Latin American literary idol, a Holocaust morality tale, pre-WWI England, stories from the shadowlands, a Victorian saga of closeted lesbians and a gay parallel narrative in seventeenth-century Amsterdam