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Books

News from Babel

The art of translation and the tragedy of Indian literature

The wretched land

A study of Pakistan’s pervasive military influence masters the broad strokes of its history but lacks the insight of intimacy

The island of the day before

An empathetic portrait of the Sri Lankan Civil War gives powerful voice to the living and the dead

Graveyard of ignorance

A first-hand study of Pashtuns offers a native’s perspective often lost on world capitals

Sacred treasure

A limited edition pictorial guide to Varanasi returns a rare British Library map to India after more than a century

‘I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth’

Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, In the Light of What We Know, is already the literary event of the year (reviewed in Open, ‘A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, 23 June 2014). Born in Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, Rahman has worked as an investment banker and human rights lawyer. The novelist in conversation with S Prasannarajan, editor, Open magazine

Recommended reading for this summer

The literary world tells us what to read this summer

The bad girl’s guide to Delhi

A first novel offers sharp visuals and flashes of insight into the city but falls victim to the very banality it projects onto its hapless subjects

A Passage to America

A warm Indian-American debut suffers the narrative pitfalls of mental illness but finds safe harbour

Memoir as manifesto

America’s former Secretary of State gears up for a presidential campaign with a much-anticipated autobiography

Magazine

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