Indira - India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister
By Sagarika Ghose
Sagarika Ghose’s bare-knuckle biography of Indira Gandhi brought to the fore memories from over a half century back of my fleeting encounters with a person of grace, and deeply penetrating, all observant eyes. Ghose’s ‘Indira,’ then, is a must-read for those who have not experienced her times firsthand—and that is the majority of Indians alive today who were not even born when Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
Dastan-e-Ghadar: The Tale of the Mutiny
By Zahir Dehlvi
It is a portrait of ‘princely India’ in the late 19th century, a period which in textbooks is dominated by the story of British India. There are vignettes of courtly patronage, of Urdu shairi as a bond between individuals, and the absence of a narrow sense of community based on religion, across north India and in Hyderabad.
Jane Austen at Home
By Lucy Worsley
The BBC presenter and historian Lucy Worsley too got caught up in Austen mania and her new book, Jane Austen at Home , urges readers to delink from the notion we have of her as a domestic, well-ordered personality.
The Windfall
By Diksha Basu Diksha Basu’s second novel is a story of migration between two worlds, both of which happen to be in the National Capital Region. The Windfall has romance, hints of tragedy—safely in the characters’ pasts—and plenty of melodrama, but it is principally a comedy, of manners and their absence.
Daring to Drive
By Manal Al-Sharif
Manal Al-Sharif’s Daring to Drive starts with a knock on the door and her arrest. To tell the story of her rebellion behind the wheel, Manal then describes her first rebellion, in which she embraced a fundamentalism learned at school and from all-pervasive propaganda and fought against the ways of her more moderate family.
