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Beyond Black Waters
Joginder Paul (translated from the Urdu by Vibha S Chauhan)
Penguin Books India, Rs 195, 120 pages

This is the English translation of Paul's acclaimed Urdu novel Paar Pare, which revolves around the community of people who were excommunicated to Kala Pani, the Andaman Islands, during British rule for alleged crimes like theft, murder, political dissent and activism. Baba Lalu, Gaura and others, exiled to the island, decide to stay back on the completion of their sentence.

They put down roots and build homes, forging a new life, creating a new society. In spite of their painful past, they are progressive, enthusiastic and sympathetic to others, setting an example of humanism and religious harmony.

But unfortunately the poison of intolerance makes inroads into their world, and Baba Lalu's family is engulfed by it. His innocent son is framed by anti-social elements and, ironically, sent to jail in Bombay, on the mainland. Going beyond the period it is set in, Beyond Black Waters highlights the terrorism of hatred and intolerance, which is bent on destroying basic human values.

A Reluctant Survivor
Sridala Swami
Sahitya Akademi,Rs 50, 83 pages

Swami is a film editor from FTII, Pune, and her work has been published in online journals such as Nthposition and Museindia. The poetry in this collection is concerned with the self and the ways in which it negotiates the world and withdraws from it by turns. In this book, places and people can appear at once familiar and fantastic, vulnerable and strange.

Most of Sridala Swami's poems are short and spare but her words are deceptively simple and her silences resonate with suggestions and ambivalences. More evocative than descriptive, these poems have an inwardness bordering on meditation, but there is also an engagement with the world outside ""cities, temples, riot-ravaged streets. Above all, these poems reflect on the subtleties of human relationships.

Sumthing of a Mocktale
Soma Das
Srishti, Rs 100, 206 pages

The subtitle "At JNU, Where Kurta Fell in Love with Jeans" will tell you that this is another breezy addition to the "mass-lit" canon. A girl named Kaya steps into JNU to discover an unofficial dress code of kurta-chappal-jhola and a mini-India that fast arranges itself into regional subgroups; she soon creates a cosmopolitan corner with other misfits like Shubhra and Ragini. Together, they embark on a roller-coaster ride to experience JNU's trivia, geography, psychology, ideology and more.

Enroute, they measure the Bong club's oomph; spend nights at Ganga dhaba, the official pre-dating spot; discover the secret of drinkers, dopers and lovers in Parthasarathy Rocks; grapple with Ragini's eccentric love-chase; stumble into misadventures of behenjis-turned-hip; accidentally expose an ugly truth during the floriculture survey; and solve the puzzle of Kaya's surreal love-story.

Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson
David Grossman
Penguin Booksm, Rs 225, 155 pages

"There are few other Bible stories with so much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion, as we find in the tale of Samson," writes David Grossman in his introduction. "Yet, beyond the wild impulsiveness, the chaos, the din, we can make out a life story that is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile."

Lion's Honey is the latest in Canongate's series of retellings of popular myths by contemporary writers. Revisiting Samson's famous battle with the lion, his many women and his betrayal by them all "" including the only one he ever loved "" Grossman gives us a provocative new take on the story and its climax, Samson's final act of death, bringing down a temple on himself and three thousand Philistines.