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HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a book of poems that appreciates the great good fortune that the passing of time brings, a taut novel that explores the personal cost of knowing too much, and a fresh adaptation that retells a classic story of friendship
Depredations and great good fortune
In Approaching 80, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra writes that ‘At 20, meeting an 80-year-old, I’d wonder what it’s like to be 80. Now I know. It’s like being 20 again...’ This means Mehrotra recognises what must seem obvious to his readers, new and old: that there’s some truth to the Japanese belief that reaching 60 brings, for the artist, a second lease of creativity, the possibility, as was the case with Hokusai, of a fresh oeuvre. Mehrotra’s eye, today, is nothing if not fresh. In fact, many of these poems, written from day to day in his garden in Dehradun, have the clarity of someone who sees himself in many ways as a painter, but continues to use words, believing they’re the best means available – at least for him – to visual and sensory immediacy. Whether writing about a moment in that garden or about walks taken during the lockdown, Mehrotra has never been so direct and exact. It’s as if he’s just beginning. And yet, because (as he says in the same poem) approaching 80 also means knowing that ‘fathers have breakdowns, mothers dementia, family houses are sold’, he’s aware, in this, his ninth, collection, of the depredations and the great good fortune that the passing of time brings.
A novel of conscience and intrigue
When Amol Batty, a war reporter with a conscience, uncovers secrets powerful governments would rather keep buried, he finds himself drawn into a web of deception that stretches from London to Beirut, Jerusalem and the Balkans. Torn between loyalty and integrity, Amol must decide whether to serve the story or to become a part of it.Inspired by award-winning foreign correspondent Shyam Bhatia’s decades as The Observer’s frontline reporter, The Quiet Correspondent explores the moral price of witnessing history being made and the personal cost of knowing too much.A taut, sharply written novel of conscience and intrigue, The Quiet Correspondent is as relevant today as when the first stories of disinformation and deep-state manipulation began to surface.
Retelling a classic fable about friendship and courage
All grown-ups were once children but only few of them remember it. A pilot has crashed his plane in the Sahara Desert and suddenly a boy with golden hair and a loveable laugh and who claims to have fallen to Earth, appears before him and asks him to draw a sheep. That’s the beginning of this fable about love, loss, loneliness and courage. The fourth-most translated book in the world, The Little Prince has been adapted to multiple art forms and has managed to resonate in the hearts of readers across the world. This adaptation by Anushka Ravishankar that’s been wonderfully illustrated by Priya Kuriyan retells the story of friendship that’s at the heart of this internationally renowned classic. *
*All copy from book flap.
