The Perfect Groom – Sumeetha Manikandan
Very little has gone right in Nithya’s young life. So, when a proposal from a young, handsome NRI comes along, her mother jumps at the opportunity and packs her daughter off to the US with her perfect groom.
Nithya seems to have settled in with Ashok, ostensibly happy, if as yet childless, in her new life. When an old flame comes back into her life, however, the cracks in her perfect marriage begin to show…
Swami and Friends – R.K. Narayan
His greatest passion is the M CC – the Malgudi Cricket Club – which he founds together with his friends: his greatest day is when the examinations are over and school breaks up – a time for revelry and cheerful riotousness. But the innocent and impulsive Swami lands in trouble when he is carried away by the more serious unrest of India in 1930. Somehow he gets himself expelled from two schools in succession, and when things have gone quite out of hand he is forced to run away from home …This is far more than a simple narrative of Swami’s adventures – charming and entertaining as they are. By the delicate sympathetically observed, the author establishes for us the child’s world as the child himself sees it: and beyond, the adult community he will one day belong to – in Swami’s case, the town of Malgudi, which provides the setting of almost all Narayan’s later novels.
Offering rare insight into the complexities of Indian middle-class society, R. K. Narayan traces life in the fictional town of Malgudi. The Dark Room is a searching look at a difficult marriage and a woman who eventually rebels against the demands of being a good and obedient wife. In Mr. Sampath, a newspaper man tries to keep his paper afloat in the face of social and economic changes sweeping India. Narayan writes of youth and young adulthood in the semi-autobiographical Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. Although the ordinary tensions of maturing are heightened by the particular circumstances of pre-partition India, Narayan provides a universal vision of childhood, early love and grief.
Full Circle – Yamini Vijendran
Outwardly, Malini is a contented, sixty-something grandmother with a loving family and everything a person could wish for. But Malini has lived her entire life with a secret confined to the deepest recesses of her heart.
Haunted by the past, she travels to Kumbakonam, her native town, which she had left years ago. There, she comes face-to-face with her long-lost love.
After forty years, will Malini be able to reclaim her own life, when love comes knocking at her door once again?
The Financial Expert – R.K. Narayan
In The Financial Expert, R. K. Narayan once again transports readers to the southern Indian town of Malgudi. This story centers around the life and pursuits of Margayya, a man of many hopes but few resources, who spends his time under the banyan tree offering expert financial advice to those willing to pay for his knowledge. Margayya’s rags-to-riches story brings forth the rich imagery of Indian life with the absorbing details and vivid storytelling that are Narayan’s trademarks.
Teatime for the Firefly – Shona Patel
“My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star”
For a young girl growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us together – me and Manik Deb.
Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb – a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined – if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.
Layla’s life as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labour and British efficiency. Fascinated by this culture of whiskey-soaked expats who seem fazed by neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialise, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her charge.
But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be her biggest challenge. Layla’s remote home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial society is at a tipping point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that threatens their very lives.
