Growing pains, detective work

3 MUST-READS

Letters for Paul
by Anu Kumar
Mapin Lit
201 pages

Sudden violence makes itself felt near the periphery of young Aditi Chatterji's life on a lazy January day in Cuttack. With mounting horror, Aditi and her family hear of a young woman in an autorickshaw being attacked with acid, so that "the sari was coming off...then her skin also. It was falling away..."

The immediate context is a political one "" clashes between the police and the Naxals in the state. But in Anu Kumar's debut novel, this incident becomes a catalyst for a young girl's examining of the world around her.

The attack on the girl in the autorickshaw is being investigated by a police officer named Mehta, a benevolent uncle-figure with a possibly sinister side.

Other people and incidents are just as shadowy and inscrutable, and as Aditi tries to make sense of them and deal with the perils of adolescence, she also writes periodic letters to someone named Paul, an old acquaintance in Delhi.

Letters for Paul appears to be a straightforward coming-of-age story on the surface, but it gets an added dimension from the possibility that the narrator may not be completely reliable. Either way, it's an intriguing and well-paced first book.

The Menagerie
by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay
Penguin Books India
Rs 295

For some time now there have been good translations of the adventures of Satyajit Ray's much-loved amateur sleuth Feluda.

Now here's a collection of stories featuring another popular detective Byomkesh Bakshi (whom you might remember from the TV serial telecast a few years ago, or even the Ray film Chiriakhana).

Included here are the novella-length "The Menagerie" and "The Quills of the Porcupine", as well as two shorter stories. These aren't the most brilliantly plotted mysteries, but they evoke the mood of the cosy, non-demanding detective tales we've all cherished as youngsters.

Specimen Days
by Michael Cunningham
HarperCollins India
£3.99

Cunningham's last novel The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into an Oscar-winning film. His work is sometimes accused of being over-experimental without quite achieving the brilliance of someone like David Mitchell.

But Specimen Days is at the very least an inventive, challenging novel. Not too unlike Mitchell's celebrated Cloud Atlas in its structure, it follows the destinies of three people "" a young woman, a boy and his dead brother "" in three very different settings: 19th century New York, a modern metropolis, and a future Earth.