Reviews of Fiction and Non-Fiction Books by The Hindu seo.section.displayname=Book Reviews

‘Undercover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva’ review: From Gujarat to Delhi, the impact of militant Hindu nationalism

A journalist gathers all his undercover investigations in the Gujarat riots case, which are now a part of court evidence, into this book

‘Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization’ review: Modern day journeys into the past

Namit Arora explores how Indians lived, ate, loved, built, fought and made sense of the material, rational and spiritual world down the ages

‘The Cracks That Let the Light In: What I Learned from my Disabled Son’ review: A mother’s journey to understand her son’s complex world

Jessica Moxham’s memoir is about parenting a special needs child in a society which doesn’t quite understand the language of disability

Rama of Adam’s family: Arshia Sattar reviews ‘Hikayat Seri Rama: The Malay Ramayana’, Translated by Harry Aveling

The Indian epic’s Malay version comfortably holds other religious and cultural traditions within itself

A reformer’s childhood: Review of ‘Shyamchi Aai’ by Sane Guruji, trs Shanta Gokhale

How does Sane Guruji’s Marathi classic, now available in a new translation by Shanta Gokhale, fare in today’s context?

In a city by the sea

A writer profiles Karachi’s everyday citizens, highlighting their fears and hopes

‘A Road Well Travelled’ review: Bofors to match-fixing, a police officer recounts life in service

R.K. Raghavan, who was in the thick of action in several cases of national interest, gives an insight into the workings of the force

‘By Many a Happy Accident: Recollections of a Life’ review: Reflections of a nationalist

In his autobiography, Hamid Ansari, Vice-President for two terms, brings to the fore the predicament of Indian Muslims, who still live in the shadow of Partition

‘Ghalib: A Wilderness at my Doorstep’: Fresh insight into Ghalib’s world

A biography of the Urdu poet and writer also signposts the literary culture of the age

‘Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India’ review: A ‘museum’ of forgotten stories from the borderlands

Travelling 9000 miles over seven years, Suchitra Vijayan tries to understand India through her boundaries with Bangladesh, China, Myanmar and Pakistan

‘Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century’ review: Constellation of words

Drawn from multiple languages, both native and imported, the 259 words in this volume provide a fascinating linguistic entry into contemporary India

Musings on the mirage city: Review of ‘The Kolkata Cadence’

The poetry manages for the most part to escape the trap of nostalgia

Burning hearts: ‘The True History of the Conquest of New Spain’ by Bernal Díaz del Castillo

We see the Spanish conquest of Mexico happening before our eyes in Bernal Díaz’s graphic account

Then a hero comes along: Review of Devashish Makhija’s ‘Oonga’

This adaptation of Devashish Makhija’s 2013 film has the feel of a screenplay

Faithful to a fault: Aditya Sudarshan reviews Keerthik Sasidharan’s ‘The Dharma Forest’

This retelling of the Mahabharata is realistic unto distastefulness, chiefly because of the author’s intoxication with the source material

Navin’s Peichi explores various facets of Malaysian Tamil life

M. Navin’s banned novel Peichi holds a mirror to Tamil life in Malaysia

‘Joe Biden: American Dreamer’ review: The story of two Joe Bidens

A biography captures the essence of the personal and public sides of the new American President’s life, one riddled with suffering and the other marked by success

‘A Ringside Seat to History’ review: Mission of a career diplomat

Assignments need imagination and hard work, not champagne and caviar, as Ambassador Nazareth shows

‘Despite the State’ review: A developmental cul-de-sac in a functioning democracy

Reporting from six States with varying histories, economics and civil structures, a journalist finds each struggling to deliver health, education and justice to its people

The call of one’s roots: Review of Prema Srinivasan’s ‘And Finally, A Blessing!’

An ancient family curse, dark forebodings, and a resolute girl on a mission

Etched in memory: Review of Anoushka Khan’s ‘Still Life’

More a work of art than a piece of literature

‘The Chipko Movement: A People’s History’ review: When nature speaks out

Remembering the people who contributed to the extraordinary Chipko movement and why the battle to protect forests and mountains is far from over

‘Being Sheela: The Life Journey of an Immigration Lawyer’ review: At the forefront of the good fight for immigrants

A biography of the successful lawyer Sheela Murthy also provides a peek into the lives of those caught in America’s complex policies

The ‘Other’ Shangri-La review: Magic mountains

A journey through ‘new’ Tibet, a place of incredible beauty, also considers myths, legends and ties with China

The horror of it all: Review of Nikhil Pradhan’s ‘Yesterday’s Ghosts’

In his eagerness to make the story cool, Nikhil Pradhan ends up making it formulaic

The overwhelming question: Review of Ameya Prabhu’s ‘The Rock Babas and Other Stories’

An impressive feat of research and background reading

Clearing the fog: Review of Daribha Lyndem’s ‘Name Place Animal Thing’

A rare peek into life in Shillong from the p.o.v. of a Khasi girl

Woman, foregrounded: Vaishna Roy reviews Salma’s ‘Women, Dreaming’, translated by Meena Kandasamy

Tamil poet-writer-politician Salma’s hard-won personal victories give her voice universal resonance and a unique, reified timbre

‘The Story of China – A Portrait of a Civilisation and Its People’ review: Tracking the China of yesterday, today and tomorrow

Michael Wood takes in the sweep of history of one of the world’s oldest civilisations from the Shangs to the new order of Xi Jinping

‘The Age of Pandemics’ review: Lessons for a pandemic

A writer explores what disease outbreaks of the past have taught the world and, particularly, India

‘The Book of Indian Essays’ review: Inside the club compound

A look at the organising principles and the writers chosen by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for an anthology of Indian essays in English that covers over 200 years

The man, the country, the community: Deepa Ganesh reviews U.R. Ananthamurthy’s ‘Avasthe’, translated by Narayan Hegde

A classic from URA, hobbled by a clumsy translation

The unaccommodated man: Review of Manoranjan Byapari’s ‘The Runaway Boy’

Manoranjan Byapari asks the simplest but toughest questions through his boy protagonist in the first part of this scathing, semi-autobiographical trilogy

‘Indian Icon: A Cult called Royal Enfield’ review: Journeys with the Bullet

A fan and a journalist tracks Royal Enfield’s origins, slump and eventual revival

‘Kamala’s Way’ review: Madam Vice-President’s story

A deep reading of Kamala Harris and her politics, including the views on gun control and education, sheds light on what she is likely to do in the White House

‘The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab’ review: The shadow cast by Partition and the trauma of displacement

Marina Wheeler traces her maternal family’s journey through the tragedy of 1947 and comes to terms with her own past

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