Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer – Cyrus Mistry
At the very edge of its many interlocking worlds, the city of Bombay conceals a near invisible community of Parsi corpse bearers, whose job it is to carry bodies of the deceased to the Towers of Silence. Segregated and shunned from society, often wretchedly poor, theirs is a lot that nobody would willingly espouse. Yet thats exactly what Phiroze Elchidana, son of a revered Parsi priest, does when he falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of an aging corpse bearer…
The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo’s real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another … and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, over the years, a subtle, shifting pattern in which they all played a part. There was Suga, the innocent, introspective girl from a respectable but impoverished family; the outgoing, cheerful, almost boyish Yumi; the flirtatious, seductive Miya, who soon found her father-in-law more dependable as a man than his brutish son…. And at the centre, rejected yet dominating them all, the near-tragic figure of the wife Tomo, whose passionate heart was always, until that final day, held in check by an old-fashioned code.
In the wake of the Battle of Waterloo, the Bourbon court in Paris and their victorious allies give lavish parties while the Royalists are quick to exact vengeance for everything since the Revolution. Countless Bonapartists are arrested and executed in what comes to be known as the White Terror. In this seething atmosphere British attaché and spy Malcolm Rannoch learns that his murdered half-sister, Princess Tatiana Kirsanova, may have left behind a secret child in Paris; a child who may now be in grave danger.
Sarfraz Manzoor was two years old when, in 1974, he emigrated from Pakistan to Britain with his mother, brother, and sister. Sarfraz spent his teenage years in a constant battle, trying to reconcile being both British and Muslim, trying to fit in at school and at home. But it was when his best friend introduced him to the music of Bruce Springsteen that his life changed completely. From the age of sixteen on, after the moment he heard the harmonica and opening lines to “The River,” Springsteen became his personal muse, a lens through which he was able to view the rest of his life.
It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favoured son of a Taiwanese
