Shannon Chakraborty returns to the world of Daevabad with The River of Silver, an anthology of about 15 stories, which continue to add layers and meaning to this political-magical-fantasy series. This is really for the fans of the trilogy, which I highly recommend. With these extra scenes, Shannon gives voice to characters which did not have their own POV in the main series. My personal favorites are the POVs for the Qahtani siblings, Muntadhir and…
Culture
Meet Gary, a child soldier. A policy spy in the Khalistan movement who single highhandedly gets dozens killed with his information. But he is not a patriot. The insurgents killed his parents and he is here for revenge. Meet Sehtab Singh, Gary’s self-appointed savior. He is the local police officer, who takes Gary under his wing and mentors him in spycraft as a CAT agent. A Ghalib quoting middle-aged, mild-mannered man, one doesn’t know what…
Of all the gory stories that swirl around Tower of London, none has quite the intrigue as that of Princes of Towers, pre-teen boys of King Edward V who were allegedly killed by their uncle Richard III. The White Queen is not about them. It’s a novel about their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and the long journey that she makes from an aristocratic nobody to a queen in hiding who never sees her children again. The…
I love historical fiction as a genre because it’s immediately transportive and provides my conscious a good excuse to not read an actual history book. Yes, it’s not the same thing but life is short, and can you blame me for finding a little joy in history-with-a-twist. An ambitious multi-generational saga, Pachinko starts off in an island village in 1903 in Korea where a Hoonie and his wife earn their livelihood by hosting lodgers. When…
I will not claim that during the pandemic cloud we are all collectively suffering under has a silver lining. But things would have been gloomier were it not the presence of some good friends. Whether one is living with a family or alone, a conversation with a friend has often provided much-needed relief. It gave me the opportunity and time to reinvest relationships that had fallen by the wayside in the business of living. And…
I am a self-confessed bookaholic. My passion for reading is such an integral part of my personality that anyone who knows me even a little cannot avoid noticing how my life is truly immersed in all things books related. So often, I get asked questions about books. Questions that send me in a mild brain freeze, have me sweating at my armpits and fumbling at my mouth — as I try to find an answer…
As an immigrant parent, I had been looking forward to participating in my son’s education journey through the American public school system. Not only I wanted to revisit math and science, but was curious to see what art, literature, and social sciences mean on this side of the hemisphere. When my son started 3rd grade, I decided to read along the novels they were studying in class. I grew up on steady diet of Enid…
In life, it’s not unusual to have moments when one feels they are losing it. Sometimes these doubts last for a second or sometimes for days. The feeling of losing one’s mind can be a result of stress, anger, nervousness, anticipation, or sometimes you are being just gaslit. And that’s the insecurity that Edith White leans into while building the narrative of her timeless novel The Wheel Spins. Made famous by the Hitchcock movie, “The…
