Using fantasy, fable and a host of wonderfully imagined characters - and the gentle, humane and philosophic voice of Vastu Master - the author creates a richly textured and complex work that eloquently explores the human condition and the underlying principles of all human action.

Ghosts of Vasu Master

Hariharan, Githa

Penguin India

Shiv Murthy is a meek, middle-aged professor of history at a college in New Delhi. When Meena, his twenty-four-year-old ward, breaks her leg, she calls on him for help, even though they barely know each other and even though Murthy’s wife is visiting their daughter in another city. Coping with Meena’s care, struggling with the feeling this intellectual, self-possessed, politically minded, and sexually aware young woman stirs in him, Murthy’s life is thrown into even further turmoil when one of his medieval Indian history lessons is challenged by a group of religious extremists. The university responds by giving Murthy the opportunity to apologize publicly. But increasingly in thrall to Meena and influenced by her political convictions, Murthy takes an entirely unexpected plunge into the political world: he defies the university and the fundamentalists, and defies as well his most basic sense of who and what he is.

In Times of Siege: A novel

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Pantheon

At 52, Shiv Murthy is a New Delhi professor of history. He leads a mild, unremarkable life until, while his wife is away, things spin out of control. First, the young and passionate daughter of an old friend breaks her leg and moves in with him. Even as he struggles to care for Meena and ignore his increasing attraction to her, a group of religious extremists challenges one of his lessons on medieval India. His instinct is to apologize, but the voice inside his head keeps asking: “Do you imagine an ordinary man cannot be a hero?” The decision he makes will prompt readers to ask themselves the same question.

In Times of Siege: A Novel

Contemporary

Vintage

“In essays that bespeak a thoroughly cosmopolitan sensibility, Githa Hariharan not only takes us on illuminating tours through cities rich in history, but gives a voice to urban people from all over the world—Kashmir, Palestine, Delhi—trying to live with basic human dignity under circumstances of dire repression or crushing poverty.” —JM Coetzee What does a medieval city in South India have in common with Washington, D.C.? How do people in Kashmir envision the freedom they long for? To whom does Delhi, city of grand monuments and hidden slums, actually belong? And what makes a city, or any place, home? In ten intricately wrought essays, renowned author Githa Hariharan takes readers on an eye-opening journey across time and place, exploring the history, landscape, and people that have shaped the world’s most fascinating and fraught cities. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s playful and powerful writing about journeys and cities, Harihan combines memory, cultural criticism, and history to sculpt fascinating, layered stories about the places around the world—from Delhi, Mumbai, and Kashmir to Palestine, Algeria, and eleventh-century Córdoba, from Tokyo to New York and Washington. In narrating the lives of these places’ vanquished and marginalized, she plumbs the depths of colonization and nation-building, poverty and war, the struggle for human rights, and the day-to-day business of survival. Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York presents a new kind of travel writing that is intellectually adventurous but never detached, couched in personal experience but deeply engaged in the world, inviting the reader to make surprising connections with her own sense of home.

Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Restless Books

Once there was a storyteller who was out of work. He didn't know how it happened, but he no longer had anyone to tell his stories to. But luckily for Kahani Bhai (also called Bhai K), he finds the best audience in the world - the winning team of friends, Nasira, Gopal, Akbari, Veer, Dulari and Ram and like magic or like the kahaniwala he really is, all the old stories crowding Bhai K's mind, all the happy, clever and funny faces of Tenali Raman, Naseeruddhin Hodja, Gopal Bhar, Birbal change into people he knows.

The Winning Team

Children's Books

Rupa&Co