Murder on the Side Street by Salil Desai is the author’s second novel. I happened to read Desai for the first time while reading a review copy of Killing Ashish Karve, which was his debut work. And it was impressive. Tightly written. When I started using Kindle, I came across his second work on a monthly deal and the author’s name
Read moreI picked this book up at the Bombay airport a few years ago and read it on my journey to Delhi. At that point, I just remembered Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron as the movie that had that timelessly funny Mahabharat scene, which as college students we would watch on loop sometimes, on Youtube. The rest of the movie was a blurry
Read moreThere has been a dearth of good readable Indian history books and The Ivory Throne helps fill that void. (Other eminently readable and lesser known Indian history books: 1857 by Vishnu Bhatt, Do and Die by Manini Chatterjee). Manu S. Pillai’s Ivory Throne is a fantastic book that chronicles the history of the kingdom of Travancore. To be frank, I only picked the book
Read moreI was somewhat surprised that I liked The Zoya Factor so much. I expected to merely pass the time on a flight with the book; what ended up happening was that I was perhaps the only one not sleeping (or not trying to sleep) on a late night flight, completely hooked to Anuja Chauhan’s first. The story line and plot
Read moreThe first thing that I noticed about the book when I saw it was the cover. In an explosive pink color, the cover is cluttered with a huge hyperlink mouse pointer image with little badges surrounding it. Yes, Start-ups in this technical age revolved around computers. For the sake of argument, which business doesn’t? I could make out the title
Read moreSyed Hussain Zaidi’s Byculla to Bangkok is touted as the sequel to Dongri to Dubai but it fails miserably, leaving very few traces of coherence in chronology. It is the first time in my life that I have been disappointed by a Hussain Zaidi book; even Rahul Bhatt’s sob story, Headley & I (co-authored with Zaidi), was far more tolerable.
Read moreTo me, ‘God of Small Things‘ has always been the gold standard for the kind of book that should win a Booker. Booker winning book after book since has disappointed me sorely. The Booker Prize it seems, is more about the one eyed amongst the blind and not really the best book of the year. That said, ‘The White Tiger‘
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