Literary writing is a mirror of sorts; it enables you to see yourself in its pages. For the first 20 years of my life, I had never read a book that reflected my life as an Indian or Indian-American. Then came my middle 20 years and with it, two miraculous decades...
THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS by Sunjeev Sahota. Knopf, 2016. 484 pages. Hardcover $18.74 I have grown up in parts of the world that have memorable seasons: Rajasthan with its summer “Loo,” a dry, hot wind that is the very opposite of a gentle summer breeze; Bombay with...
FLOOD OF FIRE. By Amitav Ghosh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. 616 pages. $20.42 Hardcover. In the epilogue to Flood of Fire, Amitav Ghosh cleverly makes mention of some 50 sources which have informed his novel. I imagine that few, if any, of these were likely to...
TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS. By Salman Rushdie. Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Books India, 2015. 286 pages Yes, the title of this review says it all: Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is about people finding their way away from God, courtesy of a War of...
Time. We all have 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year (366 if a leap year). We all have a finite number of years in a life (though depending on one’s belief in reincarnation, we may have multiple lives). But how we spend those hours, days, and years varies by...
