Tagore, Premchand, Lahore and racy suspense

4 MUST-READS

The Oxford India Illustrated Children's Tagore
Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri and
The Illustrated Premchand
Translated by David Rubin
Oxford University Press
Rs 195 each

THE OXFORD INDIA COLLECTION is a series that brings together writings of enduring value. These two books have been developed with young readers in mind. The Tagore collection includes a selection of verses, short stories, humorous plays and autobiographical writings.

The illustrations accompanying the text include doodles, line drawings and paintings by the Nobel Laureate himself. This is a fine way to introduce children to the works of this great thinker and man of letters.

The 12 stories in The Illustrated Premchand cover such themes as family bonds, children's interactions with each other, and elements of the supernatural or the unusual in seemingly ordinary situations.

"The Road to Salvation" is about revenge and human folly, "January Night" depicts the relationship between an impoverished farmer and his dog, and "A Lesson in the Holy Life" takes humorous digs at false saintliness.

These have been specially illustrated to provide youngsters with a vivid glimpse of life in the villages and small towns of north India.

Drowning Man
Michael Robotham
Time Warner Books
2.99 pounds

Also known as Lost, this is the second suspense thriller by Robotham, formerly an investigative journalist in Australia and the UK.

The story hinges on the confused first-person narrative of Detective Vincent Ruiz, who is obsessed with finding a little girl who is believed to have been murdered three years ago.

As the story opens, Ruiz has been discovered clinging to a buoy in the River Thames with a bullet in his leg and no memory of recent events.

As his colleagues increasingly refuse to believe that he has amnesia, he finds himself struggling to piece together what had happened to him and how it ties in with the girl's disappearance.

"Racy" and "gripping" are words commonly used to describe good thrillers, and The Drowning Man certainly fits those descriptions. One of the most unsettling things about this book is that we see things through the perspective of a man who is never completely sure about what's going on. Fine summer reading.

Lahore: A Sentimental Journey
Pran Neville
Penguin Books India Rs 250

This is a revised version of Neville's book, originally published in 1993. A tribute to the land of his birth, it is quite understandably grounded in nostalgia, but it uses this to provide a genuine sense of the city as it used to be in the 1930s and 1940s -- from the seasonal festivities of kite-flying to clandestine love affairs on rooftops, from matinee shows at the cinema to twilight hours spent amongst the dancing girls of Hira Mandi.

The author underscores the contrast between pre- and post-Partition Lahore, and the sense of pain, loss and longing for one's homeland experienced by the displaced millions in India and Pakistan.