By IANS,
Wanton and creative… The IANS bookshelf this weekend captures the nip in the air with a cartload of light reads.
1.Book: “Mistakes Like Love and Sex”; Written by Madhuri Banerjee; Published by Penguin-India; Price: Rs.199
“Losing My Virginity and Other Dumb Ideas” was a runaway bestseller and ruled the bestseller lists for weeks together. In the second book, which is equally thrilling, Banerjee traces further the adventures of Kaveri, the central character. Cheated by her young and handsome Spanish boyfriend, Kaveri is back in India to follow a career as an artist and to find her dream man.
However, getting involved with an older man, making out with the hottest star in Bollywood, teaching a hot, upcoming actress Hindi … her goals seem nowhere in sight. Starting afresh seems to have thrown her off completely and she begins to see the superficial life that she’s been leading. It’s time to take some hard decisions.
With fresh hope and a new philosophy, Kaveri begins to focus on her goals. Things begin to look up when there is a kindling of romance across Twitter and she starts to understand her true calling.
2.Book: “The Dark Rainbow”; Written by Vikrant Dutta; Published by Roli Books; Price: Rs.295
When Tabu and Rekha share an apartment in Mumbai, they never realise that their search for love and solace with men would come a cropper and they would be sadly disillusioned with an emotional void and a lack of trust. The comfort level they share translates into an emerging bond which has a definitive promise of fulfilment which transcends the barriers of friendship and evolves into love.
A story of love and longing, the book brings alive the colours of true love.
3.Book: “Astray”; Written by Emma Donoghue; Published by Picador, Price: Rs.599
The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Donoghue’s short stories inspired by reality have all gone astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders too, those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love and money, incognito or under duress.
The writer describes a plot by a slave and his master’s wife to escape captivity.
In another story, she writes about the difficulties of gold mining in the Yukon and scopes out a Puritan community in Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal.
The stories are candid with surprises at every turn that are almost shocking at times.
4.Book: “The Silent House”; Written by Orhan Pamuk (Translated in English for the first time); Published by Penguin Books; Price: Rs.599
Available for the first time in English, this is one of the writer’s most popular Turkish works in his country. Each summer, three siblings come to visit their old grandmother, in her dreary seaside home.
Faruk, the eldest is alcoholic, recently divorced and adrift. Metin, the youngest is full of hunger, dreaming of studying in America. And in between them is their sister, Nilgun, a fiery young revolutionary, hurtling towards womanhood.
Over the week, the family faces first love, old ghosts and childhood memories. Watching them is the dwarf Recep, the housekeeper, who has stories of his own. Haunting, and tender, “Silent House” was published to great acclaim in Turkey in 1983 and remains one of Pamuk’s most popular works in the country.
5.Book: “Bobby The Complete Story”; Written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas/Reprinted after 40 years; Published by HarperCollins India; Price: Rs.199
When the film “Bobby” was released, its writer K.A. Abbas, in an act years ahead of its time, also published the novelized version of the film, “Bobby: The Complete Story”, to great commercial success. It includes K.A. Abbas’s original preface and a perceptive new foreword by Suresh Kohli.
The release of the book marks 40 glorious years of the film’s release, its star Rishi Kapoor’s 60th birthday and Abbas’s centenary.
In 1973, the film shattered box-office records all over India. It introduced two young stars who became instant heart-throbs, and ushered in a new genre of Hindi films, the teeny-bopper romance. It also bailed out the legendary RK Films after Raj Kapoor’s “Mera Naam Joker” magnum opus.