Su Tong0.0 Disgraced Secretary Ku has been banished from the Party - it has been officially proved he does not have a fish-shaped birthmark on his bottom and is therefore not the son of a revolutionary martyr, but the issue of a river pirate and a prostitute. Mocked by the citizens of Milltown, Secretary Ku leaves the shore for a new life among the boat people on a fleet of industrial barges. Refusing to renounce his high status, he maintains a distance - with Dongliang, his teenage son - from the gossipy lowlifes who surround him. One day a feral little girl, Huixian, arrives looking for her mother, who has jumped to her death in the river. The boat people, and especially Dongliang, take her to their hearts. But Huixian sows conflict wherever she goes, and soon Dongliang is in the grip of an obsession for her. He takes on Life, Fate and the Party in the only way he knows . . .
Омаир Ахмад0.0 In Moazzamabad, UP, too large to be a town and too backward to be a city, a young man stabs a police inspector and is beaten to death. The last words he speaks are, ‘My name is Jimmy the Terrorist.’ Journalists descend on the town, ‘like shrill birds’, and a long-time resident decides to tell a story that none of them will know.
Jimmy was once Jamaal, son of Rafiq Ansari of Rasoolpur Mohalla, a Muslim neighbourhood in a Hindu town. And his story goes back a long way: to the time when Moazzamabad was named, after Aurangzeb’s son; when Rafiq was seduced by the wealth and refinements of Shabbir Manzil and married Shaista; when the Hanuman temple grew ten storeys high and the head priest was elected mayor; when Shaista died, a mosque was brought down in Ayodhya and Rafiq became a mullah. As Jamaal grows up, watching both his father and his neighbourhood change and curfew reach Moazzamabad, he is changed himself. He becomes Jimmy, one among the countless marginalized trying to find a place in the world, dimly aware that the choices that shape their lives are being made in distant places, where they have no influence.
Shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize 2009, this spare, compelling novel, as intimate as it is political, confirms Omair Ahmad’s reputation as one of the most distinctive and exciting new voices in Indian fiction.
Сиддхарт Чоудхури0.0 Zorawar Singh Shokeen of Chandrawal is one of those Delhi musclemen who run its politics from the shadows. He owns a house in the environs of the University North Campus, which he lets out as a hostel for boys. Occasionally, he uses the hostel to host his mistress, Madam Midha. Otherwise, he recruits from among his young tenants the footsoldiers for his campus campaigns; their leader, a scrawny MA (Previous) student from Bihar -- the legendary Jishnu da. It is 1992, and at this aggressively male world, ordered along the simple principles of caste, class and region, arrive two kids from Patna. The fresh-faced Pranjal Sinha and his up-for-it best friend, and the narrator of Day Scholar, Hriday Thakur.
In the twilight years between adolescence and adulthood, the Shokeen Niwas boys are concerned with elections, girls and examinations. And Hriday, who hopes to be a writer some day, is drawn, like moth to flame, irresistibly to the material they provide. Forsaking his first love, he becomes trapped instead by a series of misjudgements that lead him finally to the doorstep of Madam's house and, in it, her fourteen-year-old apple-cheeked daughter Sonya. If Hriday can be saved, it is only by the act of reading and writing.
This is a novel about love, ambition, and the fragility of both. As tender as fumbling youth and as hard as a calloused fist, Day Scholar is a clear-eyed, gritty and, ultimately, beautiful exposition of innocence under fire. It marks Siddharth Chowdhury as one of the most extraordinarily gifted writers of his generation
Эрик Гамалинда0.0 One of the Philippine Daily Inquirer 's Top 10 Books of 2014
A NewPages Book Stand Editor's Pick
"Darkly spellbinding...With a keen eye for splendor amid the grotesque, Gamalinda writes with a poet's heart and a philosopher's mind, while enthralling readers with emotional, gritty storytelling."
-- Booklist
"A mesmerizing story full of mystery...intricate...beautiful writing."
-- Publishers Weekly
"It's Gamalinda's best and most accessible novel yet, deserving to be read by as many people as possible."
-- Philippine Daily Inquirer
"It felt so easy to get swept up in this novel. The language is beautiful....a beautifully written book."
--NewPages
"The wait for Gamalinda's first US based publication was well worth [it]...An indispensable, powerful portrayal of broken families trapped in the centripetal forces of transnational capital and postcolonial politics."
--Asian American Literature Fans
"Gamalinda...does indeed write fearlessly...in rich, unflinching prose. This storytelling stayed with me...I was compelled to keep reading by the strength of the writing (it's not for nothing that Gamalinda is the recipient of the Philippine National Book Award, a Palanca Memorial Award, and a Philippine Centennial Prize)."
--Galatea Ressurects #24
"I recommend this book to those with large, giving hearts, who can afford to spend the emotional capital demanded here."
--Basso Profundo
"The Descartes Highlands is a psychologically taut drama that unravels right in front of you...I guarantee that you will be richly rewarded."
--Zachary Mule
"Behind Eric Gamalinda's jagged, ice-pick prose is an urgent need to connect and to understand. Are we more than the sum of our histories? What is this accident of being? Why is there anything at all? Written at the edge of a sinkhole and determined to resist its pull, The Descartes Highlands is about nothing less than the whole bewildering dream that is human consciousness."
--David Hollander, author of L.I.E.
"No one writes like Eric Gamalinda, though we wish we all could. The Descartes Highlands, an amazing work of brutal candor girded by a philosopher's calm, entwines our present despair with the horrific pasts we will not escape. One of the most dazzling novelists writing in America today, Eric Gamalinda has an almost classical Greek faith in the redemptive power of art. This novel delivers a commitment to beauty as unflinching as the bleak truths it tells--about globalization, about colonialism, about our human madness--offering in turn what seems our only, paradoxical hope: the pained telling of our story--a gorgeous and bitter feast."
--Gina Apostol, author of Gun Dealers' Daughter
Two men, each unaware of the other, share a common family secret: they were sold for adoption by their American father shortly after their births in the Philippines. Three alternating stories interweave the experiences of father Andrew Breszky and the two sons who try to connect and piece together the puzzle of their reckless, impulsive father. One lives in New York and the other grows up in the south of France, later traveling all over Asia as a documentary filmmaker. Both will discover that their relationships somehow echo that of the young man whose history eludes them.
Celebrated Filipino writer Eric Gamalinda's international debut novel is a contemporary work of ideas that combines mystery, film noir, and existential philosophy. Highly intricate and written in a style reminiscent of the maverick narrative techniques of such filmmakers as Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr, and with some of the philosophical underpinnings of Michel Houellebecq or Javier Marías. Named after the region of the moon where Apollo 16 landed in the same year these men were born, The Descartes Highlands demonstrates that for lives marked by unrelieved loneliness, the only hope lies in the redemptive power of love.
Ниташа Каул0.0 Residue is that which remains in us and allows us to regrow, as we move across national borders and move on from events. Named for the revolutionary Trotsky by a missing communist father he never saw, Leon Ali is a Kashmiri born in Britain and brought up by a single mother in Delhi. Keya Raina is a Kashmiri scholar of exile, an insecure immigrant, who collects other peoples stories. Marked by the oppressive history of Kashmir, they meet in Berlin, the city of Cold War partitions and begin a journey of discovery, which reveals to them the story of Shula Farid, the bohemian wife of a staid Bengali diplomat. Through their travels, these two young Kashmiris outside Kashmir find startling truths about themselves in the midst of unwitting identities and multiple belongings-the residue of shared human emotions.
A riveting exploration of mobility and affinity across the borders of nation and faith, Residue provides fascinating glimpses of class-stratified urban India, divided Berlin and complications of identity in England. It is a remarkable novel about divided lands and fortress continents, lines inked in blood and memory and the absences they create in peoples lives and imaginations.
