 "6 books to watch out for this summer")
“Every generation of Indians and Pakistanis should confront a fresh account of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947,” Ahmed Rashid wrote in the The New York Reveiw of Books, reviewing Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies. Hajari spent years researching this gripping account of Partition, adding very useful detail on the Indian army, on the history of communal prejudice in the subcontinent and on the politicking that preceded the slaughter. The chapter titles (‘Fury’, ‘Madhouse’, ‘Indian Summer’, ‘Cold War’) lead from the past to the present lack of trust.
Hajari, a well-respected journalist known for his work at Newsweek and Bloomberg, writes: “This book aims to answer a different question — not why the subcontinent was split or who to blame for the massacres, but how Partition carved out such a wide gulf between India and Pakistan. How did two countries with so much in common end up inveterate enemies, so quickly?”
Author: Nisid Hajari
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 352
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” Published in 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird has been read (and re-read) by generations for whom Scout, Boo Radley, Atticus, Dill and Jem are as real as their own family. But before she started to chronicle the repercussions of an unjust murder accusation against a black man in Maycomb County, Harper Lee had written about Scout as an adult. In Watchman, set 20 years after the events of Mockingbird, Scout is a grown woman visiting her father Atticus; it was Lee’s editor who suggested that she rewrite the book from the perspective of the young Scout. Go Set A Watchman takes its rolling title from the Bible, and is probably the most anticipated release of 2015.
There has been a bitter controversy over whether Harper Lee, now 88, had been in a fit state of mind to authorise the book’s publication, but an Alabama agency’s recent inquiry into allegations of elder-abuse was closed with the declaration that no abuse had been found.
Author: Harper Lee
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 288
Amitav Ghosh has been living in the world of the three books that make up the Ibis trilogy — Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire — for almost a decade, a long time to spend in a fictional universe. His readers and fans have no complaints: Flood of Fire, which brings the voyage of the Ibis to a close, has been eagerly anticipated. From the soldiers of the East India Company — brilliantly and authentically evoked — to Zachary Reid, speculating in opium futures, a transport ship, the Hind, takes the story from Bengal to Hong Kong.
“This is certainly the end of the Ibis trilogy,” Ghosh says. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of my engagement with these characters… I thought, many times when I was writing this last book especially that I was mad, mad to take this on — the research involved, these characters with their own life force.” Previews of Flood of Fire indicate that this will be a fine docking for one of literature’s best-loved ships.
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 624
Also Read
Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing (May 2015)
From Andal and the Buddhist nuns who wrote the Therigatha to Nivedita Menon, Ismat Chughtai and Shivani, Annie Zaidi compiles an essential reader of women’s writing across the centuries. Zaidi, a novelist, playwright and journalist who reads across several Indian languages, writes of the dismissal of women’s writing as “domestic” fiction: “There is more sex, violence, politics and overall drama in the average household than in the average office…. From such settings emerge stories of great rebellion and poetry that challenges myths…”
Author: Annie Zaidi (ed)
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Pages: 372
“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” Oliver Sacks wrote in a New York Times essay that went viral. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.” It was a typically reflective, thoughtful way to approach death, from a man who had touched millions of fans’ lives by examining the quirks of the mind and explored the many bizarre aspects of being human.
Many of his books — Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, The Mind’s Eye – are modern classics. The cover of On The Move, his autobiography, is not what you’d expect: it features a photograph of Sacks in his youth, rolling into Greenwich Village, his head shaved, on his beloved BMW bike. His memoir covers his years in hospital as a doctor, his engagement with patients, his struggles as a young neurologist with drug addiction, the people he loved and the thinkers and scientists who influenced him. His publishers write: “When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going.” Unmissable.
Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 416
The historian Ramachandra Guha writes: “In this richly researched and elegantly written book, Amrita Shah explores the paradoxes of Ahmedabad: a city that is at once nativist and cosmopolitan, caring and hedonistic, austere and exhibitionist.”
Shah starts in Naroda Patiya and in other parts of Ahmedabad that were torched in the 2002 riots, including the emptied, eerie Gulbarg Society. From the history of the mills to the lives and dilemmas of the working class, she meets artisans, diamond workers and daily labourers. This is in many ways an exploration of whom a city should belong to: its vocal, confident middle-class and socialites, its kings and kingmakers, its workers, bootleggers and the displaced. Unflinching and illuminating, Shah’s Ahmedabad is an inquiry into how a city is formed, and who is excluded or included within its circle of care.
Author: Amrita Shah
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Pages: 200