Books

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is not your usual detective story. That’s because Mma Precious Ramotswe is not your usual detective—she is “the only lady private detective in Botswana”. And no, you need not be a fan of crime fiction or detective stories to enjoy this book. Mma Ramotswe decided to set up a detective […]

Neverwhere is a stunning, imaginative tale of an “ordinary” man who accidentally stumbles into a parallel existence called London Below, which is a sort of murky underbelly of the regular London, and gets swept away in an unlikely adventure. Neverwhere happened to be the first Neil Gaiman book I read. Needless to say, I sort […]

Much as I admire Ranjit Lal, I’d have to admit that some of his recent work has been a mix of hits and misses. Despite that, he has remained a pioneer of sorts in Indian children’s writing, picking up topics that have been considered taboo for younger readers. In Our Nana Was a Nutcase, four […]

When we were kids, we would listen to same story every day with lunch during the summer holidays. As our grandmother lined us up to feed us, we would demand the story of Rakhal and the rakkhosh (demon), who are frequent characters in Bangla folktales. If she ever got sick of telling the same story […]

Imagine a multi-volume fantasy series with mages, magic, dragons, pixies, spells, prophecies and a great evil. Now imagine that only the last book of this series exists. That’s what Carry On is. If that’s not all, it is also the author’s retelling of a fan-fiction written by a character in her previous novel, Fangirl If […]

Bartimaeus, the irascible, cheeky, footnote-loving djinn, first made his appearance in Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand, and subsequently went on to star in three other books in the series. The story of Bartimaeus’ years with the young magician Nathanial (John Mandrake) and with Kitty Jones, variously enemy and ally, spans the first three books […]

How do you sum up India in a single volume? Is it even possible? Veena Seshadri and Vidya Mani take up the challenge in a volume called India A to Z: An Alphabetical Tour of Incredible India, a “bumper infopedia… packed with fascinating facts, terrific trivia and colourful cartoons on just about everything in India”. […]

What do you do when you wake up one morning and find that your mother has left you all? If you find she’s packed her bags, left a succinct note on the fridge and disappeared from your life. Would you be angry, feel betrayed, be heartbroken? Maria Sulaiman is all of this and more, as […]

Rebus is back on the force—but he’s now junior to Siobhan Clarke! Well, if that piece of news makes you sit up in disbelief, you must be a fellow-Rebus-fan. Which also means you need to pick up the nineteenth Rebus novel, The Saints of the Shadow Bible, right away. This one is a slightly mellow […]

Satire is never easy and satire for young adults would be an especially tough choice. Add to this the fact that Mike Masilamani references the Sri Lankan civil war in his The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers, and you realize what an uphill task he’s set himself. In the story, which is vividly illustrated by […]