Childhood’s end
In a small village in Awadh, fourteen-year-old Gibran’s conservative father wants him to get employed in a mosque. The boy attends the madrasa, memorizes his lessons, helps his Amma at home... and yet, on freezing Friday mornings, when he must bathe before offering prayers, he wonders why there must be Fridays in winter!
Gibran’s is an innocent world: he loves flying kites, flies even dragonflies by tying strings to their tails, skips the madrasa to watch the nat’s tamasha, gets caned for stealing a quarter-rupee coin, and when a cat grabs their hen, he asks why He who made the cat also made the hen.
One day, news arrives that his father has been arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and Gibran’s world turns upside down. Faced with death, parting and abandonment, his only refuge might lie in a world of imagination.
Celebrated Urdu writer Mohsin Khan’s acclaimed first novel, Allah Miyan’s Workshop, now masterfully translated into English by Maaz Bin Bilal, is a story about childhood and its travails – at once humorous, tender and piercing.*
A meditation on the toxicity of power
{{/usCountry}}A meditation on the toxicity of power
{{/usCountry}}Having retired from the Kerala State Police, Shreedharan Nair seeks a quiet life in a small village. But the peace he has just begun to savour is shattered one night when stones clatter against his tiled roof. As the stone-pelting becomes routine, Nair — once feared as the ruthless ‘Kaalan Shreedharan’, Kaalan being Yama, the god of death — suspects that retribution may finally be at his door. While some well-wishers see in it the handiwork of supernatural forces, others point to ghosts from his mercenary past. Driven by fear and curiosity, Nair begins retracing his career, compiling a grim list of those he once brutalised, stitched up, turned into scapegoats and nailed to the post.
Devadas VM’s Backlash unfolds through Kaalan’s encounters with figures entangled in India’s darkest chapters — the Emergency, the rise of religious fanaticism, fake encounters and mob violence — events that changed the nation’s social fabric.
A haunting meditation on the toxicity of power and the terror of powerlessness in a hyper-masculine society, this gritty novel will hold you taut with suspense until the final page.*
Doing whatever it takes
Shogo Hatano has beaten over 5,000 applicants to become one of six candidates still in the running for graduate positions at Japan’s most exclusive tech company, Spiralinks.
But the night before the last interview, they receive an email that raises the stakes: Spiralinks will only take on one of the final six, and the hopefuls must decide who.
As deliberations begin, Hatano finds six envelopes containing a shocking revelation about each candidate. The terrible secrets exposed could ruin more than just careers, they could destroy lives.
With the clock ticking, Hatano must process the scandals, figure out who planted the evidence and convince the others that he deserves the job of all their dreams.
In this Japanese bestseller, Hatano will do whatever it takes. But the wrong decision could have deadly consequences.*
*All copy from book flap.