books

Return to the Magic Mountain

Rajni George

Tired of re-reading Camus’ The Plague and closed-room murder mysteries, or of obsessing over the novel coronavirus? These ten novels about quarantine and isolation may help get you through the lockdown—whether you are ill, retreating from the world or just brooding

Illness As Allegory

Shylashri Shankar

Pandemic thoughts after reading Mary Shelley and Albert Camus

Akbar’s Idea of India

Mani Shankar Aiyar

The topical reverberations of Ira Mukhoty’s biography of the great Mughal

The Subcontinent at Ease

Siddharth Singh

A history of a brief window of cooperation casts an interesting light on India’s relations with Pakistan

Nowhere Man

Suhrith Parthasarathy

In his novel about a Sri Lankan migrant in Australia, Aravind Adiga makes the reader care with his well-earned facts

Festival Insider

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Namita Gokhale's true fiction about the most interesting and least known characters of a lit fest

An East-West Encounter

Chintan Girish Modi

An anecdotal account of yoga’s journey from an ancient road to enlightenment to a wellness industry

Nationalist Anthem

Lalitha Suhasini

The Gandhian way of music

The Legend of Kuttanad

Jai Arjun Singh

This many-layered novel, about a folk-hero and his fabulous moustache, examines the nature of story-telling— how people, animals and places can be kept alive through the narratives built around them